to the Senate.  But Lincoln persisted.  “I am after larger game,” said he.  “If Douglas so answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.”  The interrogatory was pressed upon Douglas, and Douglas did answer that, no matter what the decision of the Supreme Court might be on the abstract question, the people of a Territory had the lawful means to introduce or exclude slavery by territorial legislation friendly or unfriendly to the institution.  Lincoln found it easy to show the absurdity of the proposition that, if slavery were admitted to exist of right in the Territories by virtue of the supreme law, the Federal Constitution, it could be kept out or expelled by an inferior law, one made by a territorial Legislature.  Again the judgment of the politicians, having only the nearest object in view, proved correct:  Douglas was reelected to the Senate.  But Lincoln’s judgment proved correct also:  Douglas, by resorting to the expedient of his “unfriendly legislation doctrine,” forfeited his last chance of becoming President of the United States.  He might have hoped to win, by sufficient atonement, his pardon from the South for his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution; but that he taught the people of the Territories a trick by which they could defeat what the proslavery men considered a constitutional right, and that he called that trick lawful, this the slave power would never forgive.  The breach between the Southern and the Northern Democracy was thenceforth irremediable and fatal.

The Presidential election of 1860 approached.  The struggle in Kansas, and the debates in Congress which accompanied it, and which not unfrequently provoked violent outbursts, continually stirred the popular excitement.  Within the Democratic party raged the war of factions.  The national Democratic convention met at Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860.  After a struggle of ten days between the adherents and the opponents of Douglas, during which the delegates from the cotton States had withdrawn, the convention adjourned without having nominated any candidates, to meet again in Baltimore on the 18th of June.  There was no prospect, however, of reconciling the hostile elements.  It appeared very probable that the Baltimore convention would nominate Douglas, while the seceding Southern Democrats would set up a candidate of their own, representing extreme proslavery principles.

Meanwhile, the national Republican convention assembled at Chicago on the 16th of May, full of enthusiasm and hope.  The situation was easily understood.  The Democrats would have the South.  In order to succeed in the election, the Republicans had to win, in addition to the States carried by Fremont in 1856, those that were classed as “doubtful,”—­New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, or Illinois in the place of either New Jersey or Indiana.  The most eminent Republican statesmen and leaders of the time thought of for the Presidency were Seward and Chase,