this Union so long as there is a ray left,” he cried.[925] Why try to force slavery to go where experience has demonstrated that climate is adverse and where the people do not want it?  Why prohibit slavery where the government cannot make it exist?  “Why break up the Union upon an abstraction?” Let the one side give up its demand for protection and the other for prohibition; and let them unite upon an amendment to the Constitution which shall deny to Congress the power to legislate upon slavery everywhere, except in the matter of fugitive slaves and the African slave-trade.  “Do that, and you will have peace; do that, and the Union will last forever; do that, and you do not extend slavery one inch, nor circumscribe it one inch; you do not emancipate a slave, and do not enslave a free-man."[926]

In the course of his eloquent plea for mutual concession, Douglas was repeatedly interrupted by Wigfall of Texas, whose State was at the moment preparing to leave the Union.  In ironical tones, Wigfall begged to be informed upon what ground the senator based his hope and belief that the Union would be preserved.  Douglas replied, “I see indications every day of a disposition to meet this question now and consider what is necessary to save the Union.”  And then, anticipating the sneers of his interrogator, he said sharply, “If the senator will just follow me, instead of going off to Texas; sit here, and act in concert with us Union men, we will make him a very efficient agent in accomplishing that object."[927] But to the obdurate mind of Wigfall this Union talk was “the merest balderdash.”  Compromise on the basis of non-intervention, he pronounced “worse than ‘Sewardism,’ for it had hypocrisy and the other was bold and open.”  There was, unhappily, only too much truth in his pithy remark that “the apple of discord is offered to us as the fruit of peace.”

It was a sad commentary on the state of the Union that while the six cotton States were establishing the constitution and government of a Southern Confederacy, the Federal Senate was providing for the territorial organization of that great domain whose acquisition had been the joint labor of all the States.  Three Territories were projected.  In one of these, Colorado, a provisional government had already been set up by the mining population of the Pike’s Peak country.  To the Colorado bill Douglas interposed serious objections.  By its provisions, the southern boundary cut off a portion of New Mexico, which was slave Territory, and added it to Colorado.  At the same time a provision in the bill prevented the territorial legislature from passing any law to destroy the rights of private property.  Was the new Territory of Colorado to be free or slave?  Another provision debarred the territorial legislature from condemning private property for public uses.  How, then, could Colorado construct even a public road?  Still another provision declared that there should be no discrimination in the rate of taxation between different kinds of property.  How, then, could Colorado make those necessary exemptions which were to be found on all statute books?[928]