He had been Secretary of State under Polk, had helped to secure the Texan territory.  So much for the appeal to Young America.  He had been minister to Great Britain.  Therefore he was abroad when Douglas was gummed with the poisonous sweet of Kansas and Nebraska.  He thought slavery was wrong; therefore, you Abolitionists, here’s the man for you.  He held that territorial extension of slavery need not be feared; let the people rule.  As a Congressman he had voted to exclude abolition literature from the mails; come forward Calhoun-ites and vote for Buchanan.  They did.  Fremont did not get a vote in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee; and only 281 in Maryland, 291 in Virginia, and 364 in Kentucky.  But Millard Fillmore, running on a platform of America for Americans, almost divided the vote with Buchanan in those states.  He carried Maryland against Buchanan; but of the whole popular vote he was nearly a million behind Buchanan.  Fremont had 1,341,264 votes and Buchanan had 1,838,169 votes.  The electoral college gave Buchanan 174 votes, Fremont 114, and Fillmore 8.  Why could Douglas not have been nominated?

We got the news by telegraph in Chicago.  As I studied the bulletins, I was wondering whether the result was symptomatic of transient causes or whether it betokened great changes.  Had the Declaration of Independence been approved at the polls?  How was Douglas taking it?  I did not see him.  I wrote to him, but he did not reply.  Did he get my letter, or was he consoling himself in convivial ways?

I now prepared to go abroad.  I was leaving a country that had changed in almost every way since I had come to it.  I was leaving a city that was nothing but a hamlet when I first saw it.  I had seen New Orleans and Chicago connected by rail, and the state grow from a few hundred thousand to a million population.  I had seen Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, California, added to the Union.  Coal and iron had become barons and were doing the bidding of steam, which was king.  The oil that had floated on the surface of the salt wells of Kentucky was soon to be more powerful than cotton.  Everything had changed—­but man.  Was he rising to a purer height, had a glory begun to dawn on America?  Should slavery, polygamy, rum, be driven from the land?  Then should we be free and happy, and just and noble?  France had got schools and the ballot by the Revolution, but now she had a throne again.  We had the ballot but did we have freedom?  No law could have made a mob hiss Douglas at the North Market.  Freedom in their hearts would have given him an audience.

Was I free?  Was I happy?  I was not free.  I was not happy.  My life seemed cribbed.  Dorothy was an invalid.  I went to her from watching the election bulletins.  I sat on the side of the bed, took her in my arms.  “Let us go to Italy,” she said.  “I am dying here.”  She pressed her frail hands around my neck.  “Oh let us go—­let us go.”