Douglas fought everywhere to the last.  If in his Senatorial days and before he had been complaisant to the slavocracy, the Charleston convention would not have seceded from him.  His course now in the campaign silenced men like Hale and Seward who had nagged him for years with their depreciations and suspicions.  He went into Virginia and there while speaking he was heckled by a Breckenridge follower.  He was asked if the Southern States would be justified in seceding if Lincoln should be elected President.  “No,” thundered Douglas.  “The election of a man to the Presidency of the American people, in conformity to the Constitution of the United States, would not justify any attempt at dissolving this glorious confederacy.”

“But if the Southern States secede upon the inauguration of Lincoln, before he commits an overt act against their rights, would you advise or vindicate resistance by force to their secession?” If Douglas had ever prostituted his mind to the South, now was the time to do it again.  But this was his answer: 

“I answer that it is the duty of the President of the United States and all others in authority under him to enforce the laws of the United States as passed by Congress and as the court expounds them.  And I, as in duty bound by my oath of fidelity to the Constitution, would do all in my power to aid the government of the United States in maintaining the supremacy of the laws against all resistance to them, come from what quarter it might.  The President should meet all attempts to break up the Union as Old Hickory treated the nullifiers in 1832.”

What of the right of revolution?  Douglas conceded that, but insisted that the election of Lincoln would not be “such a grievance as would justify revolution, or secession.”

I believed this too.  Upon large ground if the South had the right to hold the negroes in slavery, the North would have the right to hold the South in the Union.  If the South wanted to stuff fate into a small pocket of logic and allow their narrow bigotry to get the better of their reason, I was in favor of licking them in the name of sport and in justification of Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest.

Douglas, in spite of threats against his life, went into the Far South appealing to them to consider the dangers ahead.  The Democratic party was hopelessly divided.  Some partisan newspapers were carrying two tickets on the editorial page.  Others were fighting Douglas bitterly; others supporting with fierce energy Breckenridge of Kentucky.  Many were scheming with a view to the contingency that the election would be a tie and that the House of Representatives, in making the choice, would select Douglas.

Chicago was a whirlpool of excitement.  In the middle summer Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, traveling in America as Baron Renfrew, came to Chicago on his way hunting in Illinois.  The fate of the nation was a passing play to him.  While he was here he was a greater object of interest than either Douglas or Lincoln.  We heard that he was to stand on the balcony of his hotel to watch the political parades of the evening.  Mr. Williams and I went forth to see the future King of England.