“You do not like Douglas, do you, Reverdy?” I asked, as we turned away.  “Yes, I like him, I have always supported him—­but somehow I feel that he is not good enough.  I don’t know what else to call it.  You know, I don’t like slavery; at the same time I don’t know what to do with it.  Sometimes I think Douglas’ plan is all right, again I am not sure.  All the time I feel that there is not enough sympathy in his nature for these poor negroes.  I confess that at times I am for letting the territories manage it for themselves; and at other times I am for keeping it out of the territories by law.  All the while I like Douglas’ plan for the West.  He has done wonderful work for the country.  I wish I could make myself clearer, but I can’t.  I saw slavery in the South and know what it is.  I am a good deal like Clay.  He had slaves but disliked the institution.  I have never had any slaves and I dislike it as much.  Yet the question is what to do.  If you keep it where it is you simply lay a siege about it.  Great suffering will come in that way to the negroes of course.  It is a kind of strangulation, selfish and small.  On the other hand, if you give it breathing space what will become of the country?  I know Douglas’ argument that it cannot exist in the North.  But suppose you have it all over the South, that’s pretty big.  Besides, what’s to hinder new work being found for the slaves?  Why can’t they dig coal and gold like peons?  Why can’t they farm?  Perhaps not; and yet I am not so sure of Douglas on that.  He is the most convincing man in the world when you are with him.  But when he goes away from you his spell slips off and you see the holes in his argument.”

“You have been reading and thinking, haven’t you, Reverdy?”

“Oh, yes, all the time.  What I am afraid of is a war.  I had a little dab of it in the Black Hawk trouble.  But a war between these states would shake the earth.  I have two boys, you know.  Sarah worries about it.  Everybody’s beginning to live in a kind of terror.”

“I have read about it too, ever since I have been in America.  I have applied my philosophically exercised faculties to it.  I have talked with Mr. Williams about it many times and with Douglas.  I have had dozens of conversations on all these things.  It seems to me that I could advance some new arguments myself.”

“What new arguments could you advance?” asked Reverdy.

“Well,” I said, “suppose I wanted to take a definite stand that slavery is wrong, which these Whigs won’t.  They only play with the question.  They want to limit it perhaps.  But why?  Is it wrong?  Or is it against northern interests?  What?  But suppose I took such a stand and needed a legal foundation.  Couldn’t I say that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories under the power it has to regulate commerce between them?  I put this question to Mr. Williams and he hadn’t thought of it; but he told me that Judge Marshall held that commerce was traffic.