Lincoln accepted the result with a serenity inexplicable to his supporters. To him the contest was but one battle in a "durable" struggle. Little matter who won now, if in the end the right triumphed. From the first he had looked at the final result--not at the senatorship. "I do not claim, gentlemen, to be unselfish," he said at Chicago in July. "I do not pretend that I would not like to go to the United States Senate; I make no such hypocritical pretense; but I do say to you that in this mighty issue, it is nothing to you, nothing to the mass of the people of the nation, whether or not Judge Douglas or myself shall ever be heard of after this night; it may be a trifle to either of us, but in connection with this mighty question, upon which hang the destinies of the nation perhaps, it is absolutely nothing." The intense heat and fury of the debates, the defeat in November, did not alter a jot this high view. "I am glad I made the late race," he wrote Dr. A. H. Henry. "It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age which I would have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone." At that date perhaps no one appreciated the value of what Lincoln had done as well as he did himself. He was absolutely sure he was right and that in the end people would see it. Though he might not rise, he knew his cause would. "Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest," he wrote. "No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon occur." His whole attention was given to conserving what the Republicans had gained--"We have some one hundred and twenty thousand clear Republican votes. That pile is worth keeping together;" to consoling his friends--"You are feeling badly," he wrote to N. B. Judd, Chairman of the Republican Committee, "and this too shall pass away, never fear"; to rallying for another effort,--"The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats." If Lincoln had at times a fear that his defeat would cause him to be set aside, it soon was dispelled. The interest awakened in him was genuine, and it spread with the wider reading and discussion of his arguments. He was besieged by letters from all parts of the Union, congratulations, encouragements, criticisms. Invitations for lectures poured in upon him, and he became the first choice of his entire party for political speeches.