The presidential election showed that the outburst of bigotry had done more harm to friends than enemies of liberty. The Democrats lost Maryland, but gained Pennsylvania and four other Northern States. This enabled them to retain the Presidency and the Senate, as well as to recover the House of Representatives, where they had become weaker than the Republicans. The party of freedom polled eight times as many votes as in 1852, and made its first appearance in the electoral colleges. It carried eleven States. The Whigs had accepted the Know Nothing nominee; and both these neutral parties soon dissolved. Anarchy in Kansas had been suppressed by United States dragoons; but they did not prevent the adoption of a pro-slavery constitution by bogus elections. Buchanan promptly advised Congress to admit Kansas as a slave State, and declared she was already as much one as Georgia or South Carolina. This opinion he based on the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any territory. Douglas insisted on the right of the people of Kansas to "vote slavery up or down." They were enabled by the joint efforts of Republicans and Northern Democrats to have a fair chance to say whether they wished to become a slave State or remain a territory; and the latter was preferred by four-fifths of the voters. V. The South called Douglas a traitor; but leading Republicans helped the Illinois Democrats, in 1858, to elect the Legislature which gave him another term in the Senate. He might have become the next President if his opponent in the senatorial contest, Abraham Lincoln, had not led the Republican party into the road towards emancipation. On June 16, 1858, he said, in the State convention: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Seward took the same position, four months later, in his speech about the "irrepressible conflict." Lincoln held that summer and autumn a series of joint debates with his opponent, before audiences one of which was estimated at twenty thousand. The speeches were circulated by the Republicans as campaign documents; and Lincoln's were remarkable, not only for his giving no needless provocation to the South, but for his proving that slavery ought not to be introduced into any new territory or State by local elections. He represented Douglas as really holding that if one man chooses to enslave another no third man has any business to interfere; and he repudiated the decision in the Dred Scott case, that coloured people "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." He had more votes that fall than Douglas; but the latter's friends were enabled by the district system to control the Legislature. Douglas was sent back to the Senate.