his subserviency. His plan of squatter
sovereignty had not got the Southerners Kansas, or any other slave
State, to balance California and Minnesota and Oregon. They demanded of
Congress positive protection for slavery in the Territories. The most
significant debate of the session was between Douglas on the one side
and a group of Southern senators, led by Jefferson Davis, on the other.
He stood up against them manfully, and told them frankly that not a
single Northern State would vote for any candidate on their platform,
and they as flatly informed him that he could not carry a single
Southern State on his.

He was too good a politician to yield, even if there had been no other
reason to stand firm, but continued to defend the only doctrine on which
there was the slightest chance of beating the Republicans in the
approaching election. One method he took to defend it was novel, but he
has had many imitators among public men of a later day. He wrote out his
argument for "Harper's," the most popular magazine of the day. The
article is not nearly so good reading as his speeches, but it was widely
read. Judge Jeremiah Black, the Attorney-General of Buchanan's cabinet,
made a reply to it, and Douglas rejoined; but little of value was added
to the discussions in Congress and on the stump. The Southerners,
however, would not take warning. As they saw their long ascendency in
the government coming to an end, their demands rose higher. Some of them
actually began to agitate for a revival of the African slave trade; and
this also Douglas had to oppose. His following in the Senate was now
reduced to two or three, and one of these, Broderick, of California, a
brave and steadfast man, was first defeated by the Southern interest,
and then slain in a duel. John Brown's invasion of Virginia somewhat
offset the aggressions of the South; but that, too, might have gone for
a warning. The elections in the autumn of 1859 were enough to show that
the North was no longer disposed to forbearance with slavery. Douglas
went as far as any man in reason could go in denouncing John Brown and
those who were thought to have set him on; and he supported a new plan
for getting Cuba. But Davis, on the very eve of the Democratic
convention at Charleston, was pressing upon the Senate a series of
resolutions setting forth the extreme demand of the South concerning the
Territories. He was as bitter toward Douglas as he was toward the
Republicans. At Charle