The issue could not have been more sharply drawn.  Popular sovereignty as applied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act was put upon the defensive.  Republican senators made haste to press their advantage.  Sumner declared that the true issue was smothered in the majority report, but stood forth as a pillar of fire in the report of the minority.  Trumbull forced the attack, while Douglas was absent, without waiting for the printing of the reports.  It needed only this apparent discourtesy to bring Douglas into the arena.  An unseemly wrangle between the Illinois senators followed, in the course of which Douglas challenged his colleague to resign and stand with him for re-election before the next session of the legislature.[560] Trumbull wisely declined to accept the risk.

On the 20th of March, Douglas addressed the Senate in reply to Trumbull.[561] Nothing that he said shed any new light on the controversy.  He had not changed his angle of vision.  He had only the old arguments with which to combat the assertion that “Kansas had been conquered and a legislature imposed by violence.”  But the speech differed from the report, just as living speech must differ from the printed page.  Every assertion was pointed by his vigorous intonations; every argument was accentuated by his forceful personality.  The report was a lawyer’s brief; the speech was the flexible utterance of an accomplished debater, bent upon a personal as well as an argumentative victory.

Even hostile critics were forced to yield to a certain admiration for “the Little Giant.”  The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin watched him from her seat in the Senate gallery, with intense interest; and though writing for readers, who like herself hated the man for his supposed servility to the South, she said with unwonted objectivity, “This Douglas is the very ideal of vitality.  Short, broad, and thick-set, every inch of him has its own alertness and motion.  He has a good head and face, thick black hair, heavy black brows and a keen eye.  His figure would be an unfortunate one were it not for the animation which constantly pervades it; as it is, it rather gives poignancy to his peculiar appearance; he has a small, handsome hand, moreover, and a graceful as well as forcible mode of using it....  He has two requisites of a debater—­a melodious voice and a clear, sharply defined enunciation....  His forte in debating is his power of mystifying the point.  With the most off-hand assured airs in the world, and a certain appearance of honest superiority, like one who has a regard for you and wishes to set you right on one or two little matters, he proceeds to set up some point which is not that in question, but only a family connection of it, and this point he attacks with the very best of logic and language; he charges upon it horse and foot, runs it down, tramples it in the dust, and then turns upon you with—­’Sir, there is your argument!  Did not I tell you so?  You see it is all stuff;’ and if you have allowed