While Douglas was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he received a dispatch from his friend, Forney, announcing that the Republicans had carried Pennsylvania in the October State election.  Similar intelligence came from Indiana.  The outcome in November was thus clearly foreshadowed.  Recognizing the inevitable, Douglas turned to his Secretary with the laconic words, “Mr. Lincoln is the next President.  We must try to save the Union.  I will go South."[880] He at once made appointments to speak in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, as soon as he should have met his Western engagements.  His friends marvelled at his powers of endurance.  For weeks he had been speaking from hotel balconies, from the platform of railroad coaches, and in halls to monster mass-meetings.[881] Not infrequently he spoke twice and thrice a day, for days together.  It was often said that he possessed the constitution of the United States; and he caught up the jest with delight, remarking that he believed he had.  Small wonder if much that he said was trivial and unworthy of his attention;[882] in and through all his utterance, nevertheless, coursed the passionate current of his love for the Union, transfiguring all that was paltry and commonplace.  From Iowa he passed into Wisconsin and Michigan, finally entering upon his Southern mission at St. Louis, October 19th.  “I am not here to-night,” he told his auditors, with a shade of weariness in his voice, “to ask your votes for the presidency.  I am not one of those who believe that I have any more personal interest in the presidency than any other good citizen in America.  I am here to make an appeal to you in behalf of the Union and the peace of the country."[883]

It was a courageous little party that left St. Louis for Memphis and the South.  Mrs. Douglas was still with her husband, determined to share all the hardships that fell to his lot; and besides her, there was only James B. Sheridan, Douglas’s devoted secretary and stenographer.  The Southern press had threatened Douglas with personal violence, if he should dare to invade the South with his political heresies.[884] But Luther bound for Worms was not more indifferent to personal danger than this modern intransigeant.  His conduct earned the hearty admiration of even Republican journals, for no one could now believe that he courted the South in his own behalf.  Nor was there any foolish bravado in this adventure.  He was thoroughly sobered by the imminence of disunion.  When he read, in a newspaper devoted to his interests, that it was “the deep-seated fixed determination on the part of the leading Southern States to go out of the Union, peaceably and quietly,” he knew that these words were no cheap rhetoric, for they were penned by a man of Northern birth and antecedents.[885]

The history of this Southern tour has never been written.  It was the firm belief of Douglas that at least one attempt was made to wreck his train.  At Montgomery, while addressing a public gathering, he was made the target for nameless missiles.[886] Yet none of these adventures were permitted to find their way into the Northern press.  And only his intimates learned of them from his own lips after his return.