The address was in a somewhat egotistical vein--pardonably egotistical, considering the extraordinary circumstances. Douglas could not refrain from referring to his career since he had confronted that excited crowd in Chicago eight years before, in defense of the compromise measures. To his mind the events of those eight years had amply vindicated the great principle of popular sovereignty. Knowing that he was in a Republican stronghold, he dwelt with particular complacency upon the manful way in which the Republican party had come to the support of that principle, in the recent anti-Lecompton fight. It was this fundamental right of self-government that he had championed through good and ill report, all these years. It was this, and this alone, which had governed his action in regard to the Lecompton fraud. It was not because the Lecompton constitution was a slave constitution, but because it was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas that he had condemned it. "Whenever," said he, "you put a limitation upon the right of a people to decide what laws they want, you have destroyed the fundamental principle of self-government."
With Lincoln's house-divided-against-itself proposition, he took issue unqualifiedly. "Mr. Lincoln asserts, as a fundamental principle of this government, that there must be uniformity in the local laws and domestic institutions of each and all the States of the Union, and he therefore invites all the non-slaveholding States to band together, organize as one body, and make war upon slavery in Kentucky, upon slavery in Virginia, upon slavery in the Carolinas, upon slavery in all of the slave-holding States in this Union, and to persevere in that war until it shall be exterminated. He then notifies the slave-holding States to stand together as a unit and make an aggressive war upon the free States of this Union with a view of establishing slavery in them all; of forcing it upon Illinois, of forcing it upon New York, upon New England, and upon every other free State, and that they shall keep up the warfare until it has been formally established in them all. In other words, Mr. Lincoln advocates boldly and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free States against the slave States--a war of extermination--to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be subdued, and all the States shall either become free or become slave."[686]