Abigail had made friends with a certain Robert Aldington, who had also come west to teach school.  And when we met at the Williams’ residence of evenings there were sharp exchanges of opinion between us about life, books, the new city of Chicago, the destiny of America, and Douglas.  Aldington was keeping abreast with all the new books in America and England as well.  He too had read De Tocqueville; but he was also familiar with Rousseau, Voltaire, the French Encyclopaedists; with Locke.  And he assured me that Calhoun, the Senator from South Carolina, had written a treatise on the philosophy of government which for depth and dialectic power, was a match for Locke.  He also knew the poets Shelley and Byron.  He had studied the French Revolution.  He was watching the feverish developments of Italy and Germany.  The tide of emigration into Chicago and Illinois furnished him material for infinite speculation.  What would this hot blood, seeking opportunity and freedom from old world restraints, do for the new country?  He admired Douglas to a degree, but he disliked what he sensed in him as materialism.

We were reading together the proceedings in Congress concerning the fine which had been imposed by court upon Jackson at New Orleans when he was in military charge of the city in 1812.  Douglas had taken this as his occasion to make himself known to the House and to the country at large.  He was nothing in Congress because of his achievements in Illinois.  He had to win his spurs.  He had contended with great force and brilliancy that Jackson, in declaring martial law, had not committed a contempt of court; that if Jackson had violated the Constitution in declaring martial law the matter was not one of contempt or for a local court to judge.  “Do you see,” said Aldington, “his mind runs in a channel of pure legalism, and then it escapes between freer shores.”  Aldington continued:  “The trouble with Douglas is that he does not see that idealism is as real as realism.  Douglas is something of a sophist.  I do not mean to disparage his value to the country.  But he is a genius in making the course of Jackson consistent.  He has applied the same art to justify his own conduct.  He will always prove an elusive debater; and you see, after all, this makes against his candor.  This is not the sort of stuff of which a thinker is made.  There are men who will not trifle with facts.  They are your Shelleys, your Emersons.  These men make the brain of a nation.  Douglas may make its body, if you can make a body without making a brain.”

“That’s exactly it,” said Abigail.  “But it is not possible to have a statesman as clear in his logic as Emerson, though dealing with coarser material than philosophy’s.  Surely there is a chance now for some mind of deep integrity, of real spirituality, to do something for this chaotic, vulgar mass of humanity that is grabbing, feeding, trying to foment war with Mexico.  I am sure of it.  Why this contempt of his for the idealist, the reformer?  He classes all sorts of grotesque, half-insane people with the high-minded thinkers of the East.  And now that he is in Congress, and will have to face some of them, Adams for example, I expect him to find a match.”