s did not
understand, had put aside Seward and taken Lincoln to be their leader.

The rivals were again confronted, but on cruelly unequal terms. From the
first, it was clear that nearly the whole North was going Republican,
and that the cotton States were for Breckinridge or disunion. Whatever
chance Douglas had in the border States and in the Democratic States of
the North was destroyed by the new party. But he knew he was at the head
of the true party of Jefferson, he felt that the old Union would not
stand if he was beaten. He was the leader of a forlorn hope, but he led
it superbly well. He undertook a canvass of the country the like of
which no candidate had ever made before. At the very outset of it he was
called upon to show his colors in the greater strife that was to follow.
At Norfolk, in Virginia, it was demanded of him to say whether the
election of a Black Republican President would justify the Southern
States in seceding. He answered, no. Pennsylvania was again the pivotal
State, and at an election in October the Republicans carried it over all
their opponents combined. Douglas was in Iowa when he heard the news. He
said calmly to his companions: "Lincoln is the next President. I have
no hope and no destiny before me but to do my best to save the Union
from overthrow. Now let us turn our course to the South"--and he
proceeded through the border States straight to the heart of the kingdom
of slavery and cotton. The day before the election, he spoke at
Montgomery, Yancey's home; that night, he slept at Mobile. If in 1858 he
was like Napoleon the afternoon of Marengo, now he was like Napoleon
struggling backward in the darkness toward the lost field of Waterloo.
There was a true dignity and a true patriotism in his appeal to his
maddened countrymen not to lift their hands against the Union their
fathers made:--

"Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough."

An old soldier of the Confederacy, scarred with the wounds he took at
Bull Run, looking back over a wasted life to the youth he sacrificed in
that ill-starred cause, remembers now as he remembers nothing else of
the whole year of revolution the last plea of Douglas for the old party,
the old Constitution, the old Union.

He carried but one State outright, and got but twelve votes in the
electoral college. Lincoln swept the North, Breckinridge the South, and
Bell the border States. Nevertheless, in the popular vote, hopeless
candida