of the legal requirement, and on the
last ballot he had fifty-one votes against the fifty-six which elected
his successful competitor. The next year, being nominated for the lower
house of Congress, he accepted, and at once resigned his place on the
bench, though the district had a Whig complexion. At the end of a
canvass which left both himself and his opponent, Browning, seriously
ill, he was elected by a majority of several hundred.

On his way to Washington, he visited Cleveland, where his westward
journey had come so near an abortive ending, and then his home-folk at
Canandaigua. He was but thirty years old, yet he had held five important
political offices, he had risen to high rank in his profession, he was
the leader of the dominant party in a great State; and all this he had
done alone, unaided. Few aged men have brought back such laurels from
their Western fortune-seeking. In December, 1843, he took his seat in
the House of Representatives and began to display before the whole
country the same brilliant spectacle of daring, energy, and success
which had captivated the people of Illinois.

CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE

It was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality
as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern
communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their
judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless
the best representative of the older school in either branch of
Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches.
"His face was convulsed,"--so the merciless diary runs,--"his
gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if
his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In
the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and
cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and
aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial
bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!" On another occasion, the same
critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia
and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory
at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate
an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and
traditions of the art. Ampere, a French traveler, thought Douglas a
perfect representative of the energetic builders of