Rumor gave strange shapes to this “mission” which carried Douglas in such haste to the Northwest.  Most persistent of all is the tradition that he was authorized to raise a huge army in the States of the upper Mississippi Valley, and to undertake that vast flanking movement which subsequently fell to Grant and Sherman to execute.  Such a project would have been thoroughly consonant with Douglas’s conviction of the inevitable unity and importance of the great valley; but evidence is wanting to corroborate this legend.[986] Its frequent repetition, then and now, must rather be taken as a popular recognition of the complete accord between the President and the greatest of War Democrats.  Colonel Forney, who stood very near to Douglas, afterward stated “by authority,” that President Lincoln would eventually have called Douglas into the administration or have placed him in one of the highest military commands.[987] Such importance may be given to this testimony as belongs to statements which have passed unconfirmed and unchallenged for half a century.

On his way to Illinois, Douglas missed a train and was detained half a day in the little town of Bellaire, Ohio, a few miles below Wheeling in Virginia.[988] It was a happy accident, for just across the river the people of northwestern Virginia were meditating resistance to the secession movement, which under the guidance of Governor Letcher threatened to sever them from the Union-loving population of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  It was precisely in this region, nearly a hundred years before, that popular sovereignty had almost succeeded in forming a fourteenth State of the Confederacy.  There had always been a disparity between the people of these transmontane counties and the tide-water region.  The intelligence that Douglas was in Bellaire speedily brought a throng about the hotel in which he was resting.  There were clamors for a speech.  In the afternoon he yielded to their importunities.  By this time the countryside was aroused.  People came across the river from Virginia and many came down by train from Wheeling,[989] Men who were torn by a conflict of sentiments, not knowing where their paramount allegiance lay, hung upon his words.

Douglas spoke soberly and thoughtfully, not as a Democrat, not as a Northern man, but simply and directly as a lover of the Union.  “If we recognize the right of secession in one case, we give our assent to it in all cases; and if the few States upon the Gulf are now to separate themselves from us, and erect a barrier across the mouth of that great river of which the Ohio is a tributary, how long will it be before New York may come to the conclusion that she may set up for herself, and levy taxes upon every dollar’s worth of goods imported and consumed in the Northwest, and taxes upon every bushel of wheat, and every pound of pork, or beef, or other productions that may be sent from the Northwest to the Atlantic in search of a market?” Secession meant endless division and sub-division, the formation of petty confederacies, appeals to the sword and the bayonet instead of to the ballot.