[Gutenberg 27579] • Stephen Arnold Douglas

Excerpt: CHAPTER II THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE It was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless the best representative of the older school in either branch of Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches. "His face was convulsed,"—so the merciless diary runs,—"his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!" On another occasion, the same critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and traditions of the art. Ampère, a French traveler, thought Douglas a perfect representative of the energetic builders of the Western commonwealths, and predicted that he would come into power when it should be the turn of the West to dominate the country. "Small, black, stocky," so this observer described him, "his speech is full of nervous power, his action simple and strong." Douglas, however, quickly adapted himself to his new environment,—no man in the country excelled him in that art,—and took on all the polish which the Washington of that day demanded, without any loss of fighting spirit or any abandonment of his democratic manners and principles. ...