Chapter IV. The Compromise of 1850.




Douglas served two terms in the House and was again elected in
1846, but in January following was chosen Senator, taking his seat
on March 4th, 1847. In April following he married Martha Denny
Martin, daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter and slave-owner.

The Senate, during the early years of his service, was in its
intellectual gifts altogether the most extraordinary body ever
assembled in the United States. Rarely, if ever, in the history of
the world, have so many men of remarkable endowment, high training
and masterful energy been gathered in a single assembly. It was the
period when the generation of Webster, Clay and Calhoun overlapped
that of Seward, Chase and Sumner, when the men who had set at the
feet of the Revolutionary Fathers and had striven to settle the
interpretation of the Constitution met the men who were destined
to guide the Nation through the Civil War and settle the perplexing
questions arising from it.

Webster was now an old man, his face deep lined with care,
disappointment and dissipation. Though sixty-eight years old and
the greatest orator of the century, his heart was still consumed
with unquenchable thirst of the honor of succeeding John Tyler
and James K. Polk. Calhoun, now sixty-five years old, a ghastly
physical wreck, still represented South Carolina and dismally
speculated on the prospect of surviving the outgrown Union. Cass,