A welcome that was truly royal awaited Douglas in Chicago.  On his way thither, he was met by a delegation which took him a willing captive and conducted him on a special train to his destination.  Along the route there was every sign of popular enthusiasm.  He entered the city amid the booming of cannon; he was conveyed to his hotel in a carriage drawn by six horses, under military escort; banners with flattering inscriptions fluttered above his head; from balconies and windows he heard the shouts of thousands.[683]

Even more flattering if possible was the immense crowd that thronged around the Tremont House in the early evening to hear his promised speech.  Not only the area in front of the hotel, but the adjoining streets were crowded.  Illuminations and fireworks cast a lurid light on the faces which were upturned to greet the “Defender of Popular Sovereignty,” as he appeared upon the balcony.  A man of far less vanity would have been moved by the scene.  Just behind the speaker but within the house, Lincoln was an attentive listener.[684] The presence of his rival put Douglas on his mettle.  He took in good part a rather discourteous interruption by Lincoln, and referred to him in generous terms, as “a kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen, and an honorable opponent."[685]

The address was in a somewhat egotistical vein—­pardonably egotistical, considering the extraordinary circumstances.  Douglas could not refrain from referring to his career since he had confronted that excited crowd in Chicago eight years before, in defense of the compromise measures.  To his mind the events of those eight years had amply vindicated the great principle of popular sovereignty.  Knowing that he was in a Republican stronghold, he dwelt with particular complacency upon the manful way in which the Republican party had come to the support of that principle, in the recent anti-Lecompton fight.  It was this fundamental right of self-government that he had championed through good and ill report, all these years.  It was this, and this alone, which had governed his action in regard to the Lecompton fraud.  It was not because the Lecompton constitution was a slave constitution, but because it was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas that he had condemned it.  “Whenever,” said he, “you put a limitation upon the right of a people to decide what laws they want, you have destroyed the fundamental principle of self-government.”

With Lincoln’s house-divided-against-itself proposition, he took issue unqualifiedly.  “Mr. Lincoln asserts, as a fundamental principle of this government, that there must be uniformity in the local laws and domestic institutions of each and all the States of the Union, and he therefore invites all the non-slaveholding States to band together, organize as one body, and make war upon slavery in Kentucky, upon slavery in Virginia, upon slavery in the Carolinas, upon slavery in all of the slave-holding States in