de a sensation in
the house as the radical leader of the South. Lee wondered if he were as
dangerous a man as the conservative members of the Whig party thought.
Toombs had voted the Whig ticket, but his speeches on the rights of the
South on the Slavery issues had set him in a class by himself.

Mr. and Mrs. Pryor had spent the night of the dance at Arlington and had
consented to stay for dinner.

Douglas had captured the young Virginia congressman. And Mrs. Douglas
had become an intimate friend of Mrs. Pryor.

When Douglas entered the library and pressed Lee's hand, the master
of Arlington studied him with keen interest. He was easily the most
impressive figure in American politics. The death of Calhoun and Clay
and the sudden passing of Webster had left but one giant on the floor of
the Senate. They called him the "Little Giant." He was still a giant.
He had sensed the approaching storm of crowd madness and had sought the
age-old method of compromise as the safety valve of the nation.

He had not read history in vain. He knew that all statesmanship is the
record of compromise--that compromise is another name for reason. The
Declaration of Independence was a compromise between the radicalism of
Thomas Jefferson and the conservatism of the colonies. In the original
draft of the Declaration, Jefferson had written a paragraph arraigning
slavery which had been omitted:

"He (the King of Great Britain) has waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him; capturing and
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the _Christian_ King
of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should
be bought and sold, he prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And
that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye,
he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to
purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the
people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes
committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges
them to commit against the lives of another."

This indictment of Slavery and the Slav