Baltimore Speech, Jan. 5, 1859. СНАР. Х. Once more, in a speech at Baltimore, Douglas Douglas, repeated in substance what he had said at Memphis and New Orleans, and then in the beginning of Pamphlet. January, 1859, he reached Washington and took his seat in the Senate. Here he began to comprehend the action of the Democratic caucus in deposing him from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories. His personal influence and prestige among the Southern leaders were gone. Neither his revived zeal for annexation, nor his advanced views on the necessity for slave labor, restored his good-fellowship with the extremists. Although, pursuant to a recommendation in the annual message, a measure was then pending in the Senate to place thirty millions in the hands of President Buchanan with which to negotiate for Cuba, the attitude of the pro-slavery faction was not one of conciliation, but of unrelenting opposition to him. Towards the close of the short session this feeling broke out in an open demonstration. On February 23, while an item of the appropriation bill was under debate, Senator Brown, of Mississippi, said he wanted the success of the Democratic party in 1860 to be a success of principles and not of men. He neither wanted to cheat nor be cheated. Under the decision of the Supreme Court the South would demand protection for slavery in the Territories. If he understood the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Douglas, he thought a Territorial Legislature might by non-action or by unfriendly action rightfully exclude slavery. He dissented from him, and now he would like to know from other Senators from the North what they would do: "If the Territorial Legislature refuses to act, CHAP. X. will you act? If it pass unfriendly acts, will you pass friendly? If it pass laws hostile to slavery, will you annul them and substitute laws favoring slavery in their stead? . . . I would rather," concluded he, "see the Democratic party sunk, never to be resurrected, than to see it successful only that one por- "Globe," tion of it might practice a fraud on another." Douglas met the issue, and defended his Freeport doctrine without flinching. The Democracy of the North hold, said he, that "if you repudiate the doctrine of non-intervention, and form a slave code by act of Congress, where the people of a Territory refuse it, you must step off the Democratic platform. I tell you, gentlemen of the South, in all candor, I do not believe a Democratic candidate can ever carry any one Democratic State of the North on the platform that it is the duty of the Federal Government to force the people of a Territory to have slavery when they do not want it." The discussion extended itself to other Senators; Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, Clay, of Alabama, Mason, of Virginia, and Gwin, of California, seconded the demands and arguments of Brown; while Pugh, of Ohio, Broderick, of California, and Stuart, of Michigan, came to the help and defense of Douglas and non-intervention. Several Republicans drifted into the debate on behalf of the position and principles of their party, which of course differed from those of both Brown and Douglas. The discussion was continued to a late hour, and finally came to an end through mere lapse of time, but not until an irreparable schism. in the Democratic party had been opened. Brown, Senate Speech, Feb. 23, 1859. pp. 1241 et seq. Douglas, pp. 1246-7. CHAP. X. Silence upon so vital an issue could not long be maintained. In the following June, an Iowa friend wrote to Douglas to inquire whether he would be a candidate for the Presidential nomination at the coming Charleston Convention. Douglas replied that party issues must first be defined. If the Democracy adhered to their former principles, his friends would be at liberty to present his name. "If, on the contrary," continued he, "it shall become the policy of the Democratic party, which I cannot anticipate, to repudiate these their timehonored principles, on which we have achieved so many patriotic triumphs, and in lieu of them the convention shall interpolate into the creed of the party such new issues as the revival of the African slave-trade, or a Congressional slave-code for the Territories, or the doctrine that the Constitution of the United States either establishes or prohibits slavery in the Territories beyond the power of the people legally to control it, as other property-it Baltimore is due to candor to say that, in such an event, I Douglas to Dorr, June 22, 1859. "Sun," June 24, 1859. could not accept the nomination if tendered to me." We must leave the career of Douglas for a while, to follow up the personal history of Lincoln. The peculiar attitude of national politics had in the previous year drawn the attention of the whole country to Illinois in a remarkable degree. The Senatorial campaign was hardly opened when a Chicago editor, whose daily examination of a large list of newspaper exchanges brought the fact vividly under his observation, wrote to Lincoln: "You are like Byron, who woke up one morning · and found himself famous. People wish to know about you. You have sprung at once from the |