He now realized that a desperate fight was to be made against him; that he was to be humiliated and driven from the Democratic ranks.
The creed laid down by the Southern senators was such as no man could indorse without forfeiting his political life in free States.
Douglas did not propose to rush on self-destruction to oblige the Democracy of the slave States; nor was he of the type of men who, when the right cheek is smitten, will meekly turn the other for a second blow.

When his Democratic associates in the Senate proceeded to read him out of the party, they apparently failed to see that they were reading the Northern Democracy out with him.

Jefferson Davis and Judah P.Benjamin might construct resolutions adapted to the latitude of the Gulf, and dragoon them through the Senate, with aid and pressure from Buchanan's administration; but Douglas commanded the votes of the Northern Democracy, and to the edict of a pro-slavery caucus he defiantly opposed the solid millions who followed his lead in the free States.
Without wrangling over the resolutions in the Senate, Douglas made answer to the whole series in a public letter of June 22, 1859, in which he said that "if it shall become the policy of the Democratic party to repudiate their time-honored principles, and interpolate such new issues as the revival of the African slave-trade, or the doctrine that the Constitution carries slavery into the Territories beyond the power of the people to legally control it as other property," he would not "accept a nomination for the Presidency if tendered him." The aggressiveness of Southern opinion on the slavery question was thus shown by Douglas in a negative or indirect view.

It is a remarkable fact, that, in still another letter, Douglas argued quite elaborately against the revival of the African slave-trade, which he believed to be among the designs of the most advanced class of pro-slavery advocates.

So acute a statesman as Douglas could not fail to see, that, at every step of his controversy with Southern Democrats, he was justifying the philosophy of Lincoln when he maintained that the country was to become wholly free, or wholly under the control of the slave power.
The controversy thus precipitated between Douglas and the South threatened the disruption of the Democratic party.