men of the parade passed with shouts. A drunken marcher fell. The
lights faded. We turned into the room. Douglas was laughing.

CHAPTER XLI

What was the result? General Taylor had 1,360,099 votes and 163
electoral votes; Cass had 1,220,544 votes and 127 electoral votes. The
Abolitionists polled 300,000 votes in the country. The Free Soilers had
polled 291,263 votes in the country. Illinois was lost to General
Taylor. The Free Soilers had swept the northeastern counties. There had
been great Democratic desertions. Voltaire and Rousseau were still at
work. These fermentations of Europe had bubbled and exploded around
Chicago. The concrete thing known as negro slavery heard the rumble of
the ground. The tariff, the bank, imperial power in Congress unwittingly
renewed their strength--unwittingly on the part of the Free Soilers.

A slave owner had become President; a man of the fresh blood of the
northwest of Michigan had been defeated. A New Yorker, wedded to the
tariff, had been put in place to be President by the death of General
Taylor. And Douglas found the forces that were to embattle him drawing
up in line.

The state was saved to the local offices. The legislature was
Democratic, but it proceeded soon to instruct Douglas as Senator to
procure the enactment of laws for the territories for the exclusion of
slavery from them. The members from Egypt, however, sustained Douglas in
his position against the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to keep slavery
from Texas. The state was thus disrupted. The opposition to the
extension of slavery dated from 1787, from the work of Jefferson in
1800. However, let the people of the territories decide the matter.
Local self-government was a popular cry. Between saying that Congress
could keep slavery out of the territories, thereby treating the
territories as property, not as subordinate sovereignties, and Congress
sending slavery into the territories, because the Constitution was over
them, what juster pragmatism were possible than to let the people of the
territories decide the matter for themselves? If the general government
was one of granted powers, where did it get the right to prohibit
slavery in the territories? No such power could be indicated.

Oh, well, there was opportunity for infinite speculation. At the same
time, here were the territories and here was slavery. The powerful North
was assuming a definite opposition to a weaker South. Iron and coal were
stronger