, and broad brow, and his
neighbors called him the "Little Giant." He could be specious, even
fallacious; he employed an _ad captandum_ kind of oratory, which was
taking with a crowd and confusing to an adversary. The man who met him
in these debates was a tall, impressive personage, rough, original, but
direct and thoroughly sincere. In many points he was the opposite of
Douglas.

He was rather an ill-ordered growth of the early West, a man who had
toiled and suffered from his youth up. He was full of sharp corners and
rough edges, and his nature was a strange mixture of patience and
melancholy. As Mr. Stephens said, he regarded slavery "in the light of a
religious mysticism," and believed that his mission to beat it down was
God-ordained. And yet he was a statesman, a public man of breadth and
prominence, a speaker of force and persuasion. He had the robust courage
of a pioneer and the high purpose of a reformer. It was in this debate
that Mr. Lincoln, at Freeport, Ill., asked Mr. Douglas that memorable
question, on the stump: "Can the people of a Territory, in any lawful
way, exclude slavery from their limits, prior to the formation of a
State constitution?" Mr. Douglas promptly answered, "Yes." This was his
doctrine of popular sovereignty. But the answer cost him the Democratic
nomination to the Presidency. The theory that a mass of settlers,
squatting in a Territory, could fix and determine the character of the
Territory's domestic institutions, was repugnant to a large portion of
the Southern people. They claimed that under the Dred Scott decision,
slavery already existed in the Territories, and must be protected by the
Constitution; and that it was not competent for the people to determine
for themselves the question of slavery or no slavery, until they formed
a constitution for admission into the Union as a State.

The election in Illinois, in the fall of 1858, gave Stephen A. Douglas a
majority of eight in the General Assembly over Abraham Lincoln, and
Douglas was reelected for the new term. In this contest he had been
opposed by the Buchanan Democrats, who cast over 8000 votes in Illinois.

In the Senate, the debate on popular sovereignty was renewed. This time
Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, attacked this position as
incompatible with the Constitution and the laws. Mr. Davis was a
skillful debater. His mind was singularly graceful and refined. He was
eloquent, logical, and courageous. His caree