andidate the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals
were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South.
Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy,
in the Department of State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were
both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It
was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the
repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.

The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his
motives, for they had to pass upon his fitness for high office and
great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural
and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any
such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his
contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord
with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in
conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not
pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the
Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had
abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong
course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into
it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely
because he was ambitious.

But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will
often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the
wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar
from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the
Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with
furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith
in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the
bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its
author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850
repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of
his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary
expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties
had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,--the principle of
"popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our
institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past;
it, and it