st Douglas in debate, for
they were champions of contrary theories, but at the end he declared:
"If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures, it
is the senator from Illinois." The enterprise, indeed, was Clay's; his
was the idea, the initiative, the general plan. It is rightly called
Clay's compromise. But the execution of the plan was quite as much
Douglas's work as his. When Clay died, no one had a better right than
Douglas to inherit his place as the statesman and orator of compromise
and conciliation.

In the defense of the settlement he was no less conspicuous. Though in
the South such extremists as Yancey and Quitman declared that the
so-called compromise was in fact a surrender of Southern rights and a
sufficient reason for abandoning the Union, there were Northern men
quite as violently exercised over what seemed to them a base truckling
to the slave power. The legislature of Illinois had formally instructed
her senators to support the Wilmot Proviso, and Douglas had thus been
compelled, all through the session, to vote for motion after motion to
prohibit slavery outright in the Territories. At the end of the session,
when he returned to his home, he found Chicago wrought up to a furor of
protest. The city council actually voted to release officials from all
obligation to enforce the fugitive slave law and citizens from all
obligation to respect it. A mass meeting was about to pass resolutions
approving this extraordinary action of the council and denouncing as
traitors the senators and representatives who had voted for the law,
when Douglas walked upon the stand, announced that the next evening he
would publicly defend the measures of compromise, and demanded to be
heard before he was condemned. A great audience, the greatest ever
assembled in the city, listened to his defense. It was bold, skilful,
successful. He avowed his authorship of three of the compromise
measures, his approval of the others. He took them up one by one,
explained them, called for objections, and answered every objection
effectively. At the end, he proposed and carried resolutions pledging
the meeting to stand by the Constitution and the laws, and the meeting
voted further, with but eight or ten nays, to repudiate the resolutions
of the council. The next night, the council met and repealed them.

It seemed, in fact, that in planting himself on the compromise Douglas
had rightly forecast the verdict of the country