only messengers,
not arbitrators. The Charleston Convention was the very opposite of
its immediate predecessor, the Cincinnati Convention. At Cincinnati,
concealment and ambiguity had been the central thought and purpose.
Everybody was anxious to be hoodwinked. Delegates, constituencies, and
leaders had willingly joined in the game of "cheat and be cheated."
Availability, harmony, party success, were the paramount objects.

[Sidenote] Douglas, Reply to Black, Pamphlet, Oct., 1859.

No similar ambiguity, concealment, or bargain was possible at
Charleston. There was indeed a whole brood of collateral issues to be
left in convenient obscurity, but the central questions must not be
shirked. The Lecompton quarrel, the Freeport doctrine, the property
theory, the "slave-State" dogma, the Congressional slave code
proposal, must be boldly met and squarely adjusted. Even if the
delegates had been disposed to trifle with their constituents, the
leaders themselves would tolerate no evasion on certain cardinal
points. Douglas, in his Dorr letter, had announced that he would
suffer no interpolation of new issues into the Democratic creed. In
his pamphlet reply to Judge Black he repeated his determination with
emphasis. "Suppose it were true that I am a Presidential aspirant;
does that fact justify a combination by a host of other Presidential
aspirants, each of whom may imagine that his success depends upon my
destruction, and the preaching a crusade against me for boldly avowing
now the same principles to which they and I were pledged at the last
Presidential election! Is this a sufficient excuse for devising a new
test of political orthodoxy?... I prefer the position of Senator or
even that of a private citizen, where I would be at liberty to defend
and maintain the well-defined principles of the Democratic party, to
accepting a Presidential nomination upon a platform incompatible with
the principle of self-government in the Territories, or the reserved
rights of the States, or the perpetuity of the Union under the
Constitution."

[Sidenote] "Globe," p. 658.

[Sidenote] Jefferson Davis, Senate Speech, "Globe," May 17, 1860,
p. 2155.

[Sidenote] "Globe", March 1, 1860, p. 935.

This declaration very clearly defined the issue on one side. On the
other side it was also formulated with equal distinctness. Jefferson
Davis, already recognized as the ablest leader of the Buchanan wing of
the Democratic Senators, wrote a