had agreed not to submit the constitution to the people.  The reply of Bigler was still allusive and evasive.  “Does he mean to say,” insisted Douglas excitedly, “that I ever was, privately or publicly, in my own house or any other, in favor of a constitution without its being submitted to the people?” “I have made no such allegation,” was the reply.  “You have allowed it to be inferred,” exclaimed Douglas in exasperated tones.[640] And then Green reminded him, that in his famous report of January 4, 1854, he had proposed to leave the slavery question to the decision of the people “by their appropriate representatives chosen by them for that purpose,” with no suggestion of a second, popular vote.  Truly, his most insidious foes were now those of his own political household.

Anti-slavery men welcomed this revolt of Douglas without crediting him with any but self-seeking motives.  They could not bring themselves to believe other than ill of the man who had advocated the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.  Republicans accepted his aid in their struggle against the Lecompton fraud, but for the most part continued to regard him with distrust.  Indeed, Douglas made no effort to placate them.  He professed to care nothing for the cause of the slave which was nearest their hearts.  Hostile critics, then, were quick to point out the probable motives from which he acted.  His senatorial term was drawing to a close.  He was of course desirous of a re-election.  But his nominee for governor had been defeated at the last election, and the State had been only with difficulty carried for the national candidates of the party.  The lesson was plain:  the people of Illinois did not approve the Kansas policy of Senator Douglas.  Hence the weathercock obeyed the wind.

In all this there was a modicum of truth.  Douglas would not have been the power that he was, had he not kept in touch with his constituency.  But a sense of honor, a desire for consistency, and an abiding faith in the justice of his great principle, impelled him in the same direction.  These were thoroughly honorable motives, even if he professed an indifference as to the fate of the negro.  He had pledged his word of honor to his constituents that the people of Kansas should have a fair chance to pronounce upon their constitution.  Nothing short of this would have been consistent with popular sovereignty as he had expounded it again and again.  And Douglas was personally a man of honor.  Yet when all has been said, one cannot but regret that the sense of fair play, which was strong in him, did not assert itself in the early stages of the Kansas conflict and smother that lawyer’s instinct to defend, a client by the technicalities of the law.  Could he only have sought absolute justice for the people of Kansas in the winter of 1856, the purity of his motives would not have been questioned in the winter of 1858.