Nevertheless, Douglas won the senatorship and kept his hold on the Northern Democrats. Immediately, he made a visit to the South. He got a hearing there, and so made good his boast that he could proclaim his principles anywhere in the Union; but when he returned to Washington he found that the party caucus, controlled by Buchanan and the Southerners, had deposed him from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories, which he had held so many years, and from this time he was constantly engaged with the enemies he had made by his course on Lecompton and by his Freeport Doctrine. His Northern opponents were no longer in his way. He had overmatched Sumner and Seward in the Senate, and beaten the administration, and held his own with Lincoln, but the unbending and relentless Southerners he could neither beat nor placate. It was men like Jefferson Davis in the Senate, and Yancey at Southern barbecues and conventions, who stood now between him and his ambition. That very slave power which he had served so well was upreared to crush him because he had come to the limit of his subserviency. His plan of squatter sovereignty had not got the Southerners Kansas, or any other slave State, to balance California and Minnesota and Oregon. They demanded of Congress positive protection for slavery in the Territories. The most significant debate of the session was between Douglas on the one side and a group of Southern senators, led by Jefferson Davis, on the other. He stood up against them manfully, and told them frankly that not a single Northern State would vote for any candidate on their platform, and they as flatly informed him that he could not carry a single Southern State on his.