BOOK II.  THE DOCTRINE OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

    Chapter VIII
    senator and constituency 145

    Chapter IX
    measures of adjustment 166

    Chapter X
    young America 191

    Chapter XI
    the Kansas-Nebraska act 220

    Chapter XII
    black republicanism 260

    Chapter XIII
    the testing of popular sovereignty 281

BOOK III.  THE IMPENDING CRISIS

    Chapter XIV
    the personal equation 309

    Chapter XV
    the revolt of Douglas 324

    Chapter XVI
    the joint debates with Lincoln 348

    Chapter XVII
    the aftermath 393

    Chapter XVIII
    the campaign of 1860 412

    Chapter XIX
    the merging of the partisan in the patriot 442

    Chapter XX
    the summons 475

BOOK I

THE CALL OF THE WEST

CHAPTER I

FROM THE GREEN MOUNTAINS TO THE PRAIRIES

The dramatic moments in the colonizing of coastal New England have passed into song, story, and sober chronicle; but the farther migration of the English people, from tide-water to interior, has been too prosaic a theme for poets and too diverse a movement for historians.  Yet when all the factors in our national history shall be given their full value, none will seem more potent than the great racial drift from the New England frontier into the heart of the continent.  The New Englanders who formed a broad belt from Vermont and New York across the Northwest to Kansas, were a social and political force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War.  The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be altogether a Yankee.  The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and sterile New England.  The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the often-quoted saying, “Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of this globe for a man to be born in, provided he emigrates when he is very young.”  The career of Stephen Arnold Douglas is intelligible only as it is viewed against the background of a New England boyhood, a young manhood passed on the prairies of Illinois, and a wedded life pervaded by the gentle culture of Southern womanhood.