a senator.  The “Douglas Democrats” wished to reelect Shields, the present incumbent.  The first ballot stood, Lincoln, 45, Shields, 41, Lyman Trumbull, 5, scattering, 5 (or, according to other authority, 8).  After several ballots Shields was thrown over in favor of a more “practicable” candidate, Governor Matteson, a “quasi-independent,” who, upon the ninth ballot, showed a strength of 47, while Trumbull had 35, Lincoln had run down to 15, and “scattering” caught 1.  Lincoln’s weakness lay in the fact that the Abolitionists had too loudly praised him and publicly counted him as one of themselves.  For this reason five Democrats, disgusted with Douglas for his attack on the Missouri Compromise, but equally bitter against Abolitionism, stubbornly refused ever to vote for a Whig, above all a Whig smirched by Abolitionist applause.  So it seemed that Owen Lovejoy and his friends had incumbered Lincoln with a fatal handicap.  The situation was this:  Lincoln could count upon his fifteen adherents to the extremity; but the five anti-Douglas Democrats were equally stanch against him, so that his chance was evidently gone.  Trumbull was a Democrat, but he was opposed to the policy of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill; his following was not altogether trustworthy, and a trifling defection from it seemed likely to occur and to make out Matteson’s majority.  Lincoln pondered briefly; then, subjecting all else to the great principle of “anti-Nebraska,” he urged his friends to transfer their votes to Trumbull.  With grumbling and reluctance they did so, and by this aid, on the tenth ballot, Trumbull was elected.  In a letter to Washburne, Lincoln wrote:  “I think you would have done the same under the circumstances, though Judge Davis, who came down this morning, declares he never would have consented to the 47 men being controlled by the 5.  I regret my defeat moderately, but am not nervous about it.”  If that was true which was afterwards so frequently reiterated by Douglas during the campaign of 1858, that a bargain had been struck between Lincoln and Trumbull, whereby the former was to succeed Shields and the latter was to succeed Douglas at the election two years later, then Lincoln certainly displayed on this occasion a “generosity” which deserves more than the very moderate praise which has been given it, of being “above the range of the mere politician’s vision."[64]

An immediate effect of this repealing legislation of 1854 was to cast Kansas into the arena as booty to be won in fight between anti-slavery and pro-slavery.  For this competition the North had the advantage that its population outnumbered that of the South in the ratio of three to two, and emigration was in accord with the habits of the people.  Against this the South offset proximity, of which the peculiar usefulness soon became apparent.  Then was quickly under way a fair fight, in a certain sense, but most unfairly fought.  Each side contended after its fashion; Northern anti-slavery merchants subscribed money to