Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of March, he rose before a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come into office by a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of 1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views. Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall upon the aged Webster? Did not Sumner live there? And he turned upon the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but _you struck him first_." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."