I run over now with as much brevity as possible the events which led to the crisis of Douglas’ life.  With the Compromises of 1850 the Whig party began its rapid decline.  The South did not like the Whig tariff.  The Whig attitude on the slavery question was too ambiguous to appeal to the North.  With its dissolution other organizations began to feed on its remains.  The Know-nothings arose and disappeared, without accomplishing anything.  Greeley said of them that they were “as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-cholera or anti-potatobug party would be.”

In early 1854 the Whigs, Free Soilers and Anti-Slavery Democrats met at Ripon, Wisconsin, and proposed to form a new party, to be called the Republican party.  They took part of the name which Jefferson had coined, dropping the word “national” out.  Douglas, enraged by this blasphemy against Jefferson, suggested that the word “black” be put in where “national” had been left out, making the name Black Republican party.

A year later Douglas put through his bill for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska, which provided that they could come into the Union with or without slavery as they chose.  He had long before voted against slavery prohibition in Texas; for the extension of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific; for the Compromises of 1850, which made California free and left Utah and New Mexico to come in free or slave, according to their own wish.  I had to confess that he had no clear constitutional theory himself.  He was only growing more emphatic in favor of popular sovereignty as a name for territorial independence on the subject.  He compared this popular sovereignty to the rights which the Colonies asserted against England to manage their own affairs, and for the violation of which the Revolution ensued.  The principle had appeared in most of the bills that he had sponsored or supported.  Now it was the real doctrine.  He was like an inventor who, after making many experiments, hits upon a working device.  He was like a philosopher, who conceives the theory, then clears it, shears away its accidents or even abandons it.  He had long been distrusted in the South.  The Kansas-Nebraska bill still further alienated the South.  The South wanted slavery carried into the territories by the Constitution, even against the will of the people of the territories.  What had Douglas to gain with popular sovereignty?  He really overestimated its appeal.  He knew that the South did not like it, but he believed that it was sound, and that it would win the majority of the people.  He advanced it not only as a solution of a vexed condition, but in the name of Liberty.

He misconceived the case, and here his tragedy began to flourish.  I was sorry to witness his discomfiture and his first forensic defeat.  Clergymen denounced him; and thinking no doubt that they were the spokesmen of the back-hall radicalism and ignorant morality which he despised, he fought them back bitterly:  “You who desecrate the pulpit to the miserable influence of party politics!  Is slavery the only wrong in the country?  If so, why not recognize the great principles of self-government and state equality as curatives?”