On the way back we noted how rapidly the country was changing.  The influx of settlers was very great.  Villages, towns were springing up everywhere.  Farmhouses were multiplying.  Douglas was enthusiastic over the great prosperity which was evident.  As an empire builder his imagination was stirred.  If he was not elected to Congress he would have to go back to the practice of law.  At this period of his life he was the eager and ambitious youth pressed in the matter of money.  I saw his career influenced, if not largely shaped, by material necessity.  And as it turned out in the election in August he was defeated by thirty-five votes in a total poll of 36,000.  We did not know the result of the election until several weeks later, due to the tardy facilities for communicating news.

He had fought against an able and experienced campaigner.  He had the handicap of extreme youth.  He had to meet the slurs of “interloper,” and the charge of being a pushing newcomer.  And yet he was almost elected.  There were discrepancies in the count, too.  He was urged to contest the election.  But the expense was too great.  He was poor.

There was much about Douglas to remind one of Napoleon:  drive, will, resourcefulness, exhaustless energy.  Too bad to remit such a man to the business of getting clients.  He was not a plodder.  He was a mind who saw men in large aggregations bound to each other by policies and interests.  He knew how to handle them as material in empire building.

On that ride back to Springfield he talked to me of many things that gave me an insight into the workings of his mind.  For the dreamer, the visionary, he had no patience; he felt contempt for the agitator and the radical.  In a theory preoccupying the human mind he saw something akin to madness.  Mormonism, abolitionism, all the various forms of propaganda which made American life so clamorous, found a common classification in his tabulation of men.  What was really before the country?  Truly, the conquest of the wilderness, the production of wealth, the development of national power; but always the rule of the people too.  “There are two things in my life,” he said to me.  “One is the fact that I got mad at my uncle, and the other is the inspiration that I get out of these prairies.  Add to these what mind I have, and the sum is myself.”

When we parted in Springfield, and I was about to return to my farm in Jacksonville, he could not thank me enough for what I had done for him.  But I was his friend, and why not?  I saw him later when a dinner was given at Quincy in honor of the Democratic governor-elect whose success Douglas had done so much to bring about.  All the speakers paid tribute to Douglas amid storms of applause.  They assured him that his firm integrity, the high order of his talent had endeared him to the people; and that he would be remembered in two years with another nomination.

As soon as I saw Reverdy I told him that I had found Zoe and all the circumstances and about Fortescue.  Reverdy thought that I should send Zoe money for living expenses on the first of each month; and so I began.