The canvass that ensued was terribly exciting--Douglas alone, of all the Presidential candidates, bravely taking the field, both North and South, in person, in the hope that the magnetism of his personal presence and powerful intellect might win what, from the start--owing to the adverse machinations, in the Northern States, of the Administration or Breckinridge-Democratic wing--seemed an almost hopeless fight. In the South, the Democracy was almost a unit in opposition to Douglas, holding, as they did, that "Douglas Free-Soilism" was "far more dangerous to the South than the election of Lincoln; because it seeks to create a Free-Soil Party there; while, if Lincoln triumphs, the result cannot fail to be a South united in her own defense;" while the old Whig element of the South was as unitedly for Bell. In the North, the Democracy were split in twain, three-fourths of them upholding Douglas, and the balance, powerful beyond their numbers in the possession of Federal Offices, bitterly hostile to him, and anxious to beat him, even at the expense of securing the election of Lincoln. Douglas's fight was that the candidacy and platform of Bell were meaningless, those of both Lincoln and Breckinridge, Sectional, and that he alone bore aloft the standard of the entire Union; while, on the other hand, the supporters of Lincoln, his chief antagonist, claimed that--as the burden of the song from the lips of Douglas men, Bell men, and Breckinridge men alike, was the expression of a "fear that," in the language of Mr. Seward, "if the people elected Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, they would wake up and find that they had no Country for him to preside over"--"therefore, all three of the parties opposing Mr. Lincoln were in the same boat, and hence the only true Union party, was the party which made no threats of Disunion, to wit, the Republican party."