With these words his tired and broken voice fell back into weakness from the great melody and power of its habitual quality.  His weary body had risen into fresh strength for this utterance.  His face assumed a great majesty.  Men and women alike wept to hear him speak so—­wept for the dark days ahead, wept for a great man failing in a struggle in which he was yet holding to cherished ideals, now being blown and scattered by the storm of the new era.  They saw him surrounded on all sides by enemies.  The South hated him.  The northern Democrats with southern ideas hated him.  The fanatics hated him.  The Republican party which he had stepped upon with giant contempt hated him.  In eight years of existence it had gathered to itself the contemptible factions that he had satirized.  They had united now in the supreme purpose of defeating him.  He was appealing for the same principles to which he had always been devoted.  He was defending the Union as he had defended it since the days when I saw Jackson put his arm around him, and look with paternal pride in his eyes.  He knew the heart and the will of the South.  He was trying to tell it to the North.  He felt that his own election would prevent disunion.  He asked people to believe that he wished to be elected, not to gratify his personal ambition, but for the sake of the Union.

It was all in vain.  The avalanche, loosened years before by stray adventurers building fires for their little kettles, and running thoughtlessly over weakened attachments, was now moving down on Douglas and the Union.  The October election showed that he was defeated.  Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana were carried by the Republicans in the state elections.  Douglas was speaking in the South.  His life had been threatened.  An attempt was made to wreck his train.  In Alabama he was showered with missiles.  Not a northern paper published these shameful insults, which if published would have won him many friends in the North.  Amid dangers and discouragements he went on to the end.

He was in Mobile when the news of Lincoln’s election reached him.  Before leaving Alabama he did what he could to prevent that state from seceding.

Undismayed, he went on to New Orleans.  There he addressed the business men, pointing out to them that Lincoln would have a hostile Senate on his hands if the South would only remain in the Union; that Lincoln could carry out no abolition or unfriendly policy toward the South without a Senate; that all of Lincoln’s appointments would have to be confirmed by the Senate.  All of these things he said to dissuade the South from secession.  When they would not be persuaded, he tore the mask from their faces and told them directly that Lincoln’s election was only a pretext for those who wished to set up a Southern Confederacy.