feeling, no alarmed patriotism transcending party lines, no great
moral uplift. He made no direct reference to the state of the public
mind. Clay began with an invocation; Webster pleaded for a hearing,
not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American
and as a Senator, with the preservation of the Union as his theme;
Douglas sprang at once to the defense of his party. With the brush of
a partisan, he sketched the policy of Northern Democrats in advocating
the annexation of Texas, repudiating the insinuations of Webster that
Texas had been sought as a slave State. He would not admit that the
whole of Texas was bound to be a slave Territory. By the very terms of
annexation, provision had been made for admitting free States out of
Texas. As for Webster's "law of nature, of physical geography,--the
law of the formation of the earth," from which the Senator from
Massachusetts derived so much comfort, it was a pity that he could not
have discovered that law earlier. The "law of nature" surely had not
been changed materially since the election, when Mr. Webster opposed
General Cass, who had already enunciated this general principle.[346]

In his reply to Calhoun, Douglas emancipated himself successfully from
his gross partisanship. Planting himself firmly upon the national
theory of the Federal Union, he hewed away at what he termed Calhoun's
fundamental error--"the error of supposing that his particular section
has a right to have a 'due share of the territories' set apart and
assigned to it." Calhoun had said much about Southern rights and
Northern aggressions, citing the Ordinance of 1787 as an instance of
the unfair exclusion of the South from the public domain. Douglas
found a complete refutation of this error in the early history of
Illinois, where slavery had for a long time existed in spite of the
Ordinance. His inference from these facts was bold and suggestive, if
not altogether convincing.