ests in
Kansas and California showed that at that game the free States with
their superior resources were certain to win. The shrewder
slaveholders recognized that fact, and their antagonism to Douglas
grew accordingly. They deliberately defeated him for the Presidency in
1860, when he was the regular candidate of the Democratic party, by
running Breckenridge as an independent candidate. Otherwise Mr.
Douglas would have become President of the United States. Out of a
total of 4,680,193 votes, Mr. Lincoln had only 1,866,631. The rest
were divided between his three antagonists.

As between Lincoln and Douglas, who together held the controlling
hand, the slaveholders preferred Lincoln, against whom they had no
personal feeling, while they knew that his policy was no more
dangerous to their interests than the other man's, if faithfully
adhered to and carried out. Besides that, by this time many of them
had reached that state of mind in which they wanted a pretext for
secession from the Union. Lincoln's election would give them that
pretext while Douglas's would not.

On a boat that carried a portion of the audience, including the
writer, from Alton to St. Louis, after the debate was over, was a
prominent Missouri Democrat, afterwards a Confederate leader, who
expressed himself very freely. He declared that he would rather trust
the institutions of the South to the hands of a conservative and
honest man like "Old Abe," than to those of "a political jumping-jack
like Douglas." The most of the other Southern men and slaveholders
present seemed to concur in his views.

It is a fact that a good many of the Anti-Slavery leaders living
outside of Illinois, and a good many of those living within it, wanted
the Republicans of that State to let Douglas go back to the Senate
without a contest, believing that he would be far more useful to them
there than a Republican would be. It is not improbable that enough of
the Illinois Republicans took that view of the matter, and helped to
give Douglas the victory in what was a very close contest.

A portion of Douglas's speech was a spirited defense of his "squatter
sovereignty" doctrine against the denunciations of members of his own
political party, in the course of which he gave President Buchanan a
savage overhauling. It showed him to be a master of invective.

"Go it, husband; go it, bear," was Mr. Lincoln's comment on that part
of Douglas's address. I went to the debate with a very