this time thoroughly dissatisfied with the position of mere compromise to which the Whigs were holding. Herndon had been an out-and-out Abolitionist from his youth up, and probably his report of his partner's sayings maybe somewhat biassed. But from 1850 on, he asserts that Lincoln had made up his mind that the slavery question could no longer be successfully compromised: indeed, we may perhaps trace this conviction back to 1848 and the visit to New England.

It was in 1852 that Douglas became for the first time a national figure. His friends were determined to gratify his ambition and make him President. For this end they had bought a well-known monthly organ called The Democratic Review. Its columns were now filled with violent attacks upon such older men as were most spoken of for the presidential nomination, the whole enterprise being characterised rather by bluster than by tact. Douglas succeeded in ruining his rival's prospects, but he failed in obtaining the prize, which went to Franklin Pierce, a "northern politician with southern principles" who became the pliant tool of the slavery party.

Though defeated, Douglas had attained a remarkable position. Coming west to Illinois when he was just twenty, he became a judge of the supreme court of that State some eight years later. After two more years he was sent to Washington as a member of Congress, and at thirty-three received the coveted honour of election to the Senate. About this time he married a Southern lady, whose father owned slaves, and himself became a man of fortune through his

investments in Chicago lands. His personal appear

ance was very striking. Lincoln had once described him as the least man I ever saw"; but this dwarfish body was crowned by a head, large out of all proportion, and he seemed the very ideal of the vital force and intellectual dominance of the West. On his first appearance in Washington indeed, he struck Eastern statesmen unpleasantly. Old John Quincy Adams had then described him as raving and roaring with the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist; but he soon adapted himself to his new environment, and became in time one of the centres of Washington Society. He modelled his manners upon those of Clay, whom he greatly admired, and in some respects resembled. He had much of the great Kentuckian's personal charm, magnetism, and real generosity; and became the idol of the younger Northern Democrats, the "representative of Young America," and especially of that energy which created Chicago. Never a real student, he relied upon a ready mind and immediate intuition in every emergency; for the rest he trusted to his fine melodious voice, his power of personal dominance, and his knowledge of men, won in the same school as Lincoln's, and his past successes, to assure his triumph.

He was not yet forty years of age, but he could claim that it was largely through his influence that Clay's last supreme effort for compromise that of 1850-had passed the Senate. He had proclaimed himself in some sort the champion not only of it, but of the Missouri Compromise, a measure he had described as being "canonised in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing.”

In spite of Douglas's rhetoric, there was a section

of the slavery party which openly denounced this sacred Compromise as unconstitutional, since it interfered with the freedom of citizens to carry their slaveproperty into the Territories north of a prescribed latitude. Another section was proposing to substitute for the final settlement which it had seemed to provide, a new principle, plausibly described as "popular sovereignty." By this, every unsettled Territory— whose destiny had hitherto been controlled by the Missouri Compromise which had prohibited slavery except in a particular section-would become the battle-ground of the slavery and anti-slavery parties, who would seek to control it before the hour came when its citizens should form their own constitution and decide for themselves whether the new State should come into the Union slave or free.

It was in January, 1854, that Douglas, then Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, accepted this last-named principle, applying it, in his revised Kansas-Nebraska Bill, to the great district west of Missouri.

With his adoption of "popular Sovereignty," there begins a new movement in American politics, and a new chapter in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Chapter VI

The Challenge

Douglas's Nostrum-Lincoln's Opposition-Speech at Peoria-A Truce ---Lincoln misses the Senatorship-Letters on Slavery-Rise of Republicanism-Speech at Bloomington-Election of 1856.

IF the Presidential nomination of 1852 offered Douglas the opportunity of attaining national eminence, Douglas's Nebraska Bill was the opportunity of Lincoln. 1854 was a year of Congressional elections, and from January onwards, but especially from the passage of the Bill at the end of May till far into the succeeding autumn, the country was filled with a continually increasing clamour of debate, which seemed to reach its climax in September when Douglas came West, to defend his policy before his constituents.

For

The political apathy of recent years had been suddenly swept away, and men, though still hesitating to break their old party ties, were being inevitably drawn to take sides for or against the Nebraska Bill. Henceforward, until it was settled, there could only be one issue that of the Extension of Slavery. Douglas and his fellow-senators had attacked the whole Constitutional theory, that slavery, while it was an evil rendered necessary by past circumstances, was one which must be kept within a prescribed area and excluded from the rest of the national domain. Douglas used to say, with the characteristic

speciousness of a false analogy, "God Almighty placed man on the earth and told him to choose between good and evil: that was the origin of the Nebraska Bill." Let us look into this statement a moment, and see what Douglas's Bill really meant. Popular sovereignty was the name with which Douglas replaced the title of "squatter sovereignty" given in derision by Calhoun to Cass's nostrum of 1847. This had been introduced by the latter, as an alternative to the proviso of Wilmot, for which Lincoln voted some forty times while a member of Congress. It had proposed that Congress might permit the people of any Territory to choose for themselves, whether they would admit or prohibit slavery. In the Compromise of 1850, which was an attempt to settle a specific quarrel between the two great parties, the difficulty of deciding whether the Territories of Utah and New Mexico-then formed out of the recent conquests from Mexico-had or had not already recognised the status of slavery, was evaded by leaving it to the people of those Territories to determine. No such doubt existed in the case of Nebraska, which was part of the area north of the Missouri line speciflcally declared by previous Compromises as free from any question on this issue. But when Douglas-who, since 1843, had been seeking to induce Congress to organise Nebraska as a Territory and thus to open it for settlement-perceived that he could accomplish his pet project by juggling adroitly for votes, both North and South, with "popular sovereignty," he erected this, which had hitherto been a mere piece of political expediency, into "a great principle" of universal application.