being either repudiated or construed in the interest of the South.
Jefferson Davis frankly deprecated the "great hazard" which
representatives from his section ran in 1854; but, he added, "I take
it for granted my friends who are about me must have understood at
that time clearly that this was the mere reference of a right; and
that if decided in our favor, congressional legislation would follow
in its train, and secure to us the enjoyment of the right thus
defined."[788]

The wide divergence of purpose and opinion which this debate revealed,
dashed any hope of a united Democratic party in 1860. Men who looked
into the future were sobered by the prospect. If the Democratic party
were rent in twain,--the only surviving national party,--if
Northerners and Southerners could no longer act together within a
party of such elastic principles, what hope remained for the Union?
The South was already boldly facing the inevitable. Said Brown,
passionately, "If I cannot obtain the rights guaranteed to me and my
people under the Constitution, as expounded by the Supreme Court,
then, Sir, I am prepared to retire from the concern.... When our
constitutional rights are denied us, we _ought_ to retire from the
Union.... If you are going to convert the Union into a masked battery
from behind which to make war on me and my property, in the name of
all the gods at once, why should I not retire from it?"[789]

After the 23d of February, Douglas neither gave nor expected quarter
from the Southern faction led by Jefferson Davis. So far from avoiding
conflict, he seems rather to have forced the fighting. He flaunted his
views in the faces of the fire-eaters. Prudence would have suggested
silence, when a convention of Southern States met at Vicksburg and
resolved that "all laws, State and Federal, prohibiting the African
slave-trade, ought to be repealed,"[790] but Douglas, who knew
something of the dimensions which this illicit traffic had already
assumed, at once declared himself opposed to it. He said privately in
a conversation, which afterwards was reported by an anonymous
correspondent to the New York _Tribune_, that he believed fifteen
thousand Africans were brought into the country last year. He had seen
"with his own eyes three hundred of those recently imported miserable
beings in a slave-pen at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and also large
numbers at Memphis, Tennessee."[791]

In a letter which speedily became public property, Douglas