the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by the legislation of 1850,” and therefore “inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this Act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution.”  After a long and hard fight the bill was passed with this clause in it, which Benton well stigmatized as a “stump speech injected into the belly of the bill.”  The insertion of the word State was of momentous significance.

This repeal set the anti-slavery party all ablaze.  Among the rest Lincoln was fired with strenuous indignation, and roused from the condition of apparent indifference to public affairs in which he had rested since the close of his term in Congress.  Douglas, coming home in the autumn, was so disagreeably received by an angry audience in Chicago that he felt it imperative to rehabilitate his stricken popularity.  This difficult task he essayed at the great gathering of the State Fair in October.  But Lincoln was put forward to answer him, and was brilliantly successful in doing so, if the highly colored account of Mr. Herndon may be trusted.  Immediately after Lincoln’s close, Owen Lovejoy, the Abolitionist leader, announced “a meeting in the same place that evening of all the friends of freedom.”  The scheme was to induce Lincoln to address them, and thus publicly to commit him as of their faith.  But the astute Herndon, though himself an Abolitionist, felt that for Lincoln personally this was by no means desirable.  So he hastened to Lincoln and strenuously said:  “Go home at once!  Take Bob with you, and drive somewhere into the country, and stay till this thing is over;” and Lincoln did take Bob and drove away to Tazewell Court House “on business.”  Herndon congratulates himself upon having “saved Lincoln,” since either joining, or refusing to join, the Abolitionists at that time would have been attended with “great danger.”  Lincoln had upon his own part a wise instinct and a strong purpose to keep hard by Douglas and to close with him as often as opportunity offered.  Soon afterward the two encountered again, and on this occasion it is narrated that Lincoln gave Douglas so much trouble that Douglas cried for a truce, proposing that neither of them should make any more speeches that autumn, to which Lincoln good-naturedly assented.

During this winter Lincoln was elected to the state legislature, but contrary to his own wish.  For he designed to be a candidate for the United States Senate, and there might be a question as to his eligibility if he remained a member of the electing body.  Accordingly he resigned his seat, which, to his surprise and chagrin, was immediately filled by a Democrat; for there was a reaction in Sangamon County.  On February 8, 1855, the legislature began voting to elect