. At the end of May, the President signed it, and
Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder
task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of
national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852,
made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own
historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a
turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung
swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity to foreigners
and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to
meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party,
conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was
struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of
the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for
years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its
breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of
Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves
Republicans.

He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at
Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the
Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage
to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these
new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive
warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry
A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only
rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the
fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never
recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of
consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights
of the foreign born.

The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the
Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home
to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a
centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there the
evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and
the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously
silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke
in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clock until