The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of securing the support of the administration the bill might have failed. There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas's friend and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate. Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas, in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was instant with the counter-move. It was a month before the bill could be brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852, made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung swiftly and secretly into life on the old issue of enmity to foreigners and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party, conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves Republicans. He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the mystery in which these new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never recovered from their defeat. Douglas's course had the merit of consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights of the foreign born.