The breech-loading gun had been invented.  The fire-alarm telegram system had come into use.

Thackeray had come over from England to smile upon us genially, to lecture at the rate “of a pound a minute,” as he had expressed it.  Young America was putting old America behind her.

Calhoun was gone.  Clay, defeated in his life’s ambition to be President, had crept to his grave.  Webster was a dying man.  The slavery question had vexed and shadowed his dying years.  He had supported the Compromises of 1850 and had been bitterly denounced for it.  Whittier had expunged his name from the list of the great and the good.  He had wanted to be President too.  Men like General Harrison had secured the prize over his head.  He was reduced to the rejection of the proffered Vice Presidency.  He had been Secretary of State under Harrison, Tyler, and Fillmore.  He had supported the bank, the tariff, implied powers, and Hamiltonism.  He had followed Clay’s leadership.  Still he had risen to great heights of oratory and legalistic reason.  Carlyle had called him a logic machine in pants.  His debate with Hayne, however, was to furnish the material for one of the greatest of state papers, to be written less than a decade from this day.  From the hills of Massachusetts he failed to see the West.  Young Douglas had fronted him and told him of the power of the new and growing country along the Mississippi River.  Old America was passing.  The West was asking for the highest recognition.  Douglas was thirty-nine and seemed to be the man for President.

I did not pretend to be a politician, but only an observer and Douglas’ friend.  I read everything that was written about the questions of the day, the newspapers, the Congressional Record.  It was clear to me that the Democrats had been split in 1848 by their attitude toward the Wilmot Proviso, which was intended to keep slavery from the Texan territory.  Then came the Compromises under a Whig administration.  The Compromises were hated by the South and cursed by the Abolitionists in the North.  The Democrats were united by an acquiescence in the Compromises.  And now the Whigs were divided because of them.  They had played foxy in ’48 by a no-platform.  They were unable to have one, because they had no united voice.  The Free Soil party had collapsed in Illinois.  Altogether hopes ran high for the Democrats.  But who should be the candidate?

Douglas!  He seemed to me the ideal man, as Webster seemed the ideal man to admiring Whigs.  But Douglas, like Webster, was doomed to fail, at least in this convention.  The prize was captured by Franklin Pierce, whom no one knew, but it was not until the forty-ninth ballot.  On the forty-eighth ballot Douglas had thirty-three votes to Pierce’s fifty-five.  Then there was a stampede to Pierce.  The West had lost.  Young America was put aside for a fair-sized man from New Hampshire.