Three years and a half ago, Judge Douglas brought forward his famous
Nebraska Bill. The country was at once in a blaze. He scorned all
opposition, and carried it through Congress. Since then he has seen
himself superseded in a Presidential nomination by one indorsing the
general doctrine of his measure, but at the same time standing clear of
the odium of its untimely agitation and its gross breach of national
faith; and he has seen that successful rival constitutionally elected,
not by the strength of friends, but by the division of adversaries, being
in a popular minority of nearly four hundred thousand votes. He has seen
his chief aids in his own State, Shields and Richardson, politically
speaking, successively tried, convicted, and executed for an offence not
their own but his. And now he sees his own case standing next on the
docket for trial.
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the
idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and
Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of his
being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he
can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea upon
his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm.
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