The state was saved to the local offices.  The legislature was Democratic, but it proceeded soon to instruct Douglas as Senator to procure the enactment of laws for the territories for the exclusion of slavery from them.  The members from Egypt, however, sustained Douglas in his position against the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to keep slavery from Texas.  The state was thus disrupted.  The opposition to the extension of slavery dated from 1787, from the work of Jefferson in 1800.  However, let the people of the territories decide the matter.  Local self-government was a popular cry.  Between saying that Congress could keep slavery out of the territories, thereby treating the territories as property, not as subordinate sovereignties, and Congress sending slavery into the territories, because the Constitution was over them, what juster pragmatism were possible than to let the people of the territories decide the matter for themselves?  If the general government was one of granted powers, where did it get the right to prohibit slavery in the territories?  No such power could be indicated.

Oh, well, there was opportunity for infinite speculation.  At the same time, here were the territories and here was slavery.  The powerful North was assuming a definite opposition to a weaker South.  Iron and coal were stronger than cotton.  What was to be done by a man who had the burdens of leadership?  How should the whole people be at peace?  Since slavery could not be removed from the states, why not let its tendrils creep into the territories and there flourish or wither according to the soil?  Since it was practical, not radical policy to confine it to the states, and not to abolish it in the states, it was practical and not radical policy to let the territories decide the matter for themselves.  If the first course aroused the fury of the Abolitionists, the second course found no favor with the Free Soilers, and ambitious Whigs, drawing upon abolitionism and free soilism for food, for northern mercantilism and for a larger slavery of both blacks and whites.

I had now lived so long in America, seen so much of the country, read so extensively of politics and history, that I was able to follow the questions involved in this crisis.  All the while I had the benefit of Douglas’ association, who talked to me intimately of his own plans and of persons and issues, as they arose.  There were calls upon him now to resign the Senatorship; but he had no intention of doing so.  His fighting blood was aroused.  He was hardened to contests and to misunderstanding and abuse.  He had been berated for coarseness and charged with the half-culture of the West.  His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency.  He was attacked as a demagogue.  The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War.  His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America.  Yet men were in power because of him.  A Whig had been elected President upon a war record of a fight for Texas.  Who wished to part with Texas, New Mexico, California, or Oregon?