Prospective candidates who sat in Congress had at least this advantage, over their outside competitors,—­they could keep themselves in the public eye by making themselves conspicuous in debate.  But the wisdom of such devices was questionable.  Those who could not point with confident pride to their record, wisely chose to remain non-committal on matters of personal history.  Douglas was one of those who courted publicity.  Perhaps as a young man pitted against older rivals, he felt that he had everything to gain thereby and not much to lose.  The irrepressible Foote of Mississippi gave all his colleagues a chance to mar their reputations, by injecting into the deliberations of the Senate a discussion of the finality of the compromise measures.[377] It speedily appeared that fidelity to the settlement of 1850, from the Southern point of view, consisted in strict adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act.[378] This was the touchstone by which Southern statesmen proposed to test their Northern colleagues.  Prudence whispered silence into many an ear; but Douglas for one refused to heed her admonitions.  Within three weeks after the session began, he was on his feet defending the consistency of his course, with an apparent ingenuousness which carried conviction to the larger audience who read, but did not hear, his declaration of political faith.

Two features of this speech commended it to Democrats:  its recognition of the finality of the compromise, and its insistence upon the necessity of banishing the slavery question from politics.  “The Democratic party,” he asseverated, “is as good a Union party as I want, and I wish to preserve its principles and its organization, and to triumph upon its old issues.  I desire no new tests—­no interpolations into the old creed."[379] For his part, he was resolved never to speak again upon the slavery question in the halls of Congress.

But this was after all a negative programme.  Could a campaign be successfully fought without other weapons than the well-worn blunderbusses in the Democratic arsenal?  This was a do-nothing policy, difficult to reconcile with the enthusiastic liberalism which Young America was supposed to cherish.  Yet Douglas gauged the situation accurately.  The bulk of the party wished a return to power more than anything else.  To this end, they were willing to toot for old issues and preserve the old party alignment.  For four years, the Democratic office-hunters had not tasted of the loaves and fishes within the gift of the executive.  They expected liberality in conduct, if not liberalism in creed, from their next President.  Douglas shared this political hunger.  He had always been a believer in rotation in office, and an exponent of that unhappy, American practice of using public office as the spoil of party victory.  In this very session, he put himself on record against permanence in office for the clerks of the Senate, holding that such positions should fall vacant at stated intervals.[380]