ed. Then the first discordant note came between
Dorothy and Abigail. For Emerson said: "We must get rid of slavery, or
get rid of freedom." Abigail exclaimed over this epigrammatic truth.
Dorothy looked at Abigail disapprovingly, apparently seeing in her face
evidence of a different spirit than she had hitherto suspected.
Aldington joined Abigail in praise of Emerson. And for the sake of a
balance, I sided with Dorothy and Mother Clayton against them. Though
none of us had anything to do directly with the matter of slavery, it
thus cast its shadow upon our otherwise happy relationship.

In these readings too I was following with great care the career of
Douglas in Congress, in which Abigail and Aldington were not so warmly
interested. Douglas' early life, his adventure into the West, had put
him through an experience and into the possession of an understanding
which were alien to the eastern statesmen. The West was for the
enterprise of the young. It was a domain of opportunity for youth,
divorced from family influence and the tangles of decaying environment.
Hence Texas must be assimilated, and California taken eventually, and
the Oregon country acquired. An ocean-bound republic!

As for slavery, it did not enter into Douglas' calculations. I knew,
however, that in spite of what any one said, he was not a protagonist of
slavery. He simply subordinated it to the interests of expansion. He was
willing to leave it to the new states to determine for themselves
whether they should have slavery or not. With the impetuosity of his
thirty-two years he slipped into a recognition of the Missouri
Compromise, and was willing that slavery should be prohibited north of
this line. He was generating a plague for himself which would come back
upon him later.

But if Douglas' advocacy of the Texas expansion exposed him to charges
of a slave adherency, nothing could be said against his cry for the
taking of Oregon. The Mormons whom he had befriended without any
dishonor to himself had set forth into the untraveled land of Utah.
Already a band of young men from Peoria had gone into the Far West.
Therefore, when he now spoke for Oregon he had a responsive ear among
his own people in Illinois. If the eastern people, the dwellers in the
old communities, did not kindle to Oregon, it was because they had
neither the flare nor did they see the urge of this emigration and
occupancy. With the rapid extension of railroads, how soon would the
wh