Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/396

 368 T. W. Davenport. On the 3rd of June, 1861, died Stephen A. Douglas, the precipitator of the conflict which disrupted the Union for four awful years. The Little Giant, presumably, had not the slightest anticipation of what happened, for like many another ambitious son of man, self aggrandized, was projected upon the future, which ever way he looked. His success as a governor of men, while being borne by the current, was so great that he was mis led to believing himself the master of the current, but the Divinity which shapes our ends, he, in common with all mankind, ha i not comprehended, and to his perplexity and dire disgrace, ne found himself a wreck upon the off shore. He committed many blunders, even when viewed with reference to his own selfish interests, as all men do who leave out of their calculations the moral laws inherent in human affairs; but he proffered all the atonement in his power, by exhorting his followers to attach themselves to the defenders of the Union, which he professed to love as well as Webster or Clay. His influence in turning them to the sup- port of Lincoln's administration was, no doubt, valuable; at least, we felt it to be so in Oregon ; and in the spring of 1862, the union of forces thus formed, placed the State Government, in all its branches, in the care and control of those who had no mental reservations to weaken their loyalty. Considered as to age and physical ability, the demise of Douglas was entirely unaccountable. He was but a little over fifty, of great vital powers, admirably formed, not a weak spot in his make-up, big-chested, big-brained, had a deep and powerful voice ample for all occasions, and we must infer that he is another instance among the many who, from disappointed ambition, have dropped, from sheer dejection of spirit, into untimely graves. But those who fight in ''some great cause, God's new Messiah," are not dismayed and dejected by personal defeat; they are sustained and soothed by an undying hope and self- consecration, even when the material form is incompetent to sustain its vitality. Douglas, however, was not so actuated, was not so sustained. His better impulses were over-borne,