Still, there was the ugly fact that the Toombs bill had gone to his committee with the clause, and had emerged shorn of it.  Toombs himself threw some light on the matter by stating that the clause had been stricken out because there was no provision for a second election, and therefore no proper safeguards for such a popular vote.[583] The probability is that Douglas, and in fact most men, deemed it sufficient at that time to provide a fair opportunity for the election of a convention.[584] When Trumbull preferred his charges in detail in the campaign of 1858, Douglas at first flatly denied that there was a submission clause in the original Toombs bill.  Both Trumbull and Lincoln then convicted Douglas of error, and thus put him in the light of one who had committed an offense and had sought to save himself by prevaricating.

The Toombs bill passed the Senate over the impotent Republican opposition; but in the House it encountered a hostile majority which would not so much as consider a proposition emanating from Democratic sources.[585] Douglas charged the Republicans with the deliberate wish and intent to keep the Kansas issue alive.  “All these gentlemen want,” he declared, “is to get up murder and bloodshed in Kansas for political effect.  They do not mean that there shall be peace until after the presidential election....  Their capital for the presidential election is blood.  We may as well talk plainly.  An angel from Heaven could not write a bill to restore peace in Kansas that would be acceptable to the Abolition Republican party previous to the presidential election."[586]

“Bleeding Kansas” was, indeed, a most effective campaign cry.  Before Congress adjourned, the Republicans had found other campaign material in the majority report of the Kansas investigating committee.  The Democrats issued the minority report as a counter-blast, and also circulated three hundred thousand copies of Douglas’s 12th of March report, which was held to be campaign material of the first order.  Douglas himself paid for one-third of these out of his own pocket.[587] No one could accuse him of sulking in his tent.  Whatever personal pique he may have felt at losing the nomination, he was thoroughly loyal to his party.  He gave unsparingly of his time and strength to the cause of Democracy, speaking most effectively in the doubtful States.  And when Pennsylvania became the pivotal State, as election day drew near, Douglas gave liberally to the campaign fund which his friend Forney was collecting to carry the State for Buchanan.[588]

Illinois, too, was now reckoned as a doubtful State.  Douglas had forced the issues clearly to the fore by pressing the nomination of Richardson for governor.[589] Next to himself, there was no man in the State so closely identified with Kansas-Nebraska legislation.  The anti-Nebraska forces accepted the gage of battle by nominating Bissell, a conspicuous figure among those Democrats who could not sanction the repeal