After the 23d of February, Douglas neither gave nor expected quarter from the Southern faction led by Jefferson Davis.  So far from avoiding conflict, he seems rather to have forced the fighting.  He flaunted his views in the faces of the fire-eaters.  Prudence would have suggested silence, when a convention of Southern States met at Vicksburg and resolved that “all laws, State and Federal, prohibiting the African slave-trade, ought to be repealed,"[790] but Douglas, who knew something of the dimensions which this illicit traffic had already assumed, at once declared himself opposed to it.  He said privately in a conversation, which afterwards was reported by an anonymous correspondent to the New York Tribune, that he believed fifteen thousand Africans were brought into the country last year.  He had seen “with his own eyes three hundred of those recently imported miserable beings in a slave-pen at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and also large numbers at Memphis, Tennessee."[791]

In a letter which speedily became public property, Douglas said that he would not accept the nomination of the Democratic party, if the convention should interpolate into the party creed “such new issues as the revival of the African slave-trade, or a congressional slave code for the Territories."[792] And to leave no doubt as to his attitude he wrote a second letter, devoted exclusively to this subject; it also found its way, as the author probably intended it should, into the newspapers.  He opposed the revival of the African slave-trade because it was abolished by one of the compromises which had made the Federal Union and the Constitution.  “In accordance with this compromise, I am irreconcilably opposed to the revival of the African slave-trade, in any form and under any circumstances."[793] How deeply this unequivocal condemnation lacerated the feelings of the South, will never be known until the economic necessities and purposes of the large plantation owners are more clearly revealed.

The captious criticism of the Freeport doctrine by Southerners of the Calhoun-Jefferson Davis school was less damaging, from a legal point of view, than the sober analysis of Lincoln.  The emphasis in Lincoln’s famous question at Freeport fell upon the word lawful:  “Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,” etc.  Douglas had replied to the question of legal right by an assertion of the power of the people of the Territories.  This answer, as Lincoln pointed out subsequently, was equivalent to saying that “a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has the lawful right to be."[794] As a prediction, Douglas’s simple statement, that if the people of a Territory wanted slavery they would have it, and if they did not, they would not let it be forced on them, was fully justified by the facts of American history.  It has been characteristic of the American people that, without irreverence for law, they have not allowed it to stand in the way of their natural development:  they have not, as a rule, driven rough-shod over law, but have quietly allowed undesirable laws to fall into innocuous desuetude.