If any Democrat harbored a doubt that the proposed reconciliation meant simply a reunion on the Davis-Yancey platform, the doubt was soon removed.  In the Senate of the United States, Jefferson Davis was pressing to a vote his caucus resolutions, submitted in February, to serve as a model for the Charleston platform; and this brought on a final discussion between himself and Douglas.

  [Sidenote] “Globe,” May 7, 1860, p. 1940.

  [Sidenote] Appendix.  “Globe,” May 15 and 16, 1860, pp. 312, 313,
  and 316.

  [Sidenote] “Globe,” May 17, 1860, p. 2151.

  [Sidenote] Ibid., p. 2153.

  [Sidenote] Ibid., p. 2155.

Davis had begun the debate on the 7th of May by a savage onslaught on “Squatter Sovereignty”—­a fallacy, he said, fraught with mischief more deadly than the fatal upas, because it spread its poison over the whole Union.  Douglas took up the gauntlet, and, replying on May 15 and 16, said he could not recognize the right of a caucus of the Senate or the House to prescribe new tests for the Democratic party.  Senators were not chosen for the purpose of making platforms.  That was the duty of the Charleston Convention, and it had decided in his favor, platform, organization, and least of all the individual, by giving him a majority of fifty votes over all the other candidates combined.  He reprobated the Yancey movement as leading to dissolution and a Southern confederacy.  The party rejected this caucus platform.  Should the majority, he asked, surrender to the minority?  Davis, replying on the 17th, contended that Douglas had, on the Kansas policy of the Administration, put himself outside the Democratic organization.  He desired no divided flag for the party.  He preferred that the Senator’s banner should lie in its silken folds to feed the moth; “but if it impatiently rustles to be unfurled in opposition to ours, we will plant our own on every hill.”  Douglas retorted, and again attacked the caucus dictation.  “Why,” he asked, “are all the great measures for the public good made to give place to the emergency of passing some abstract resolutions on the subject of politics to reverse the Democratic platform, under the supposition that the representatives of the people are men of weak nerve who are going to be frightened by the thunders of the Senate Chamber?” Davis rejoined, that they wanted a new article in the creed because they could not get an honest construction of the platform as it stood.  “If you have been beaten on a rickety, double-construed platform, kick it to pieces, and lay one broad and strong, on which men can stand.”  “We want nothing more than a simple declaration that negro slaves are property, and we want the recognition of the obligation of the Federal Government to protect that property like all other.”  A somewhat restrained undertone of personal temper had been running through the debate, and Jefferson Davis could not resist an expression of contempt for his opponent.  “The fact is,” said he, “I have a declining respect for platforms.  I would sooner have an honest man on any sort of a rickety platform that you could construct, than to have a man I did not trust on the best platform which could be made.”