tor. Of his party
associates in the Senate, but two or three were brave enough to follow
him. Moreover, the panic had swept away his wealth. He was near the end
of his term of office, and the trend in Illinois was toward the
Republicans. The long tide which had so steadily borne him on to fortune
seemed to ebb. Married again but recently, and to the most beautiful
woman in Washington, he must have had in mind, as he took up his new
role, some such thought as that which fortified his favorite hero at
Marengo: one battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another.

The Lecompton plotters had reckoned on the opposition of the
Republicans. It was Douglas and his handful of followers who confounded
them. At once, they accused him of deserting them to make sure of his
reelection to the Senate. But as the debate progressed, and his name
kept appearing on the same side with Sumner's and Seward's in the
divisions, another notion spread. Horace Greeley and other Republicans
began to suggest that he might be the man to lead the new party to
victory on a more moderate platform. Throughout the North, people who
had abhorred him came first to wonder at him and then to praise him.

But he fought the Lecompton conspiracy from his old base. It was
contrary to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; there had been
gross frauds at the election of delegates; the form of submission was a
mockery of the electors. He would say nothing for slavery or against it.
He cared not "whether slavery was voted up or voted down." Give the
people a fair and free chance to form and adopt a constitution, and he
would accept it. Let them have a fair vote on the Lecompton
constitution, and if they ratified it he would accept that. Ratified it
was at the absurd election the convention had ordered, for the great
majority of the settlers could not vote their opposition, but when the
legislature, now Free-Soil, took the authority to submit it as a whole,
the majority against it by far exceeded the highest total of votes the
pro-slavery men had ever mustered. Nevertheless, the Senate passed it,
Douglas and three other Democrats voting in the negative. His following
in the House was greater, and the bill was there amended so as to
provide for submitting the constitution to the people. There was a
conference, and in its final form the bill offered the people of Kansas
a bribe of lands if they would accept the constitution, and threatened
them with an ind