Reëlected senator for several successive periods, he became through the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which he himself drafted, the advocate of “popular sovereignty,” a phrase which he coined to take the place of the less dignified term “squatter sovereignty,” that had previously designated the principle that each state had a right to decide such questions as slavery for itself. He returned to Chicago in 1854, to be met by a mob who denounced his policy, and immediately threw himself into an active campaign in the hostile counties of northern Illinois. When he came back to secure his seat in the Senate for another term, Douglas had been placed by the course of national events in an entirely new position. Bitterly resenting the trickery which had made “popular sovereignty” a mere name and had given the state of Kansas at the Lecompton convention into the hands of the pro-slavery men, Douglas stood out on the floor of the Senate against his party and declared his opposition to the Lecompton constitution. Revolting against his own party, he was nevertheless representing the sentiment of Illinois and the Northwest, and he returned to Chicago in 1858 to an unequalled popularity. It was four years since Douglas had been in Chicago,--since the day when he had been met by a storm of abuse and his address had been heralded by the lowering of flags to half-mast and the tolling of bells as for some public calamity. Now an enthusiastic delegation met him at Michigan City and escorted him by special train to his home. As his train entered Chicago it was greeted by the booming of cannon, and every sign of public enthusiasm. Crowds filled the streets and banners waved from the balconies and windows. The whole city was brilliantly decorated; bands of music marched the streets; and in a carriage drawn by six horses and surrounded by a military escort Senator Douglas, “The Defender of Popular Sovereignty,” as the banners proclaimed him, drove to the Tremont House, receiving everywhere a welcome that proclaimed him the idol of his fellow-citizens. The Tremont House was the finest hotel in the city. The first house of that name had been built in 1832. It had been burned, as had its immediate successor, and the proprietor had erected on the land a fine brick building five stories and a half high, containing two hundred rooms, whose extravagant cost of seventy thousand dollars and whose magnificence the business men of Chicago had been inclined to ridicule as entirely beyond the possible needs of the city at its erection, but which they were now beginning to regard as an evidence of great foresight on the part of its builder. From its balcony Douglas delivered on the night of his arrival the first address of the campaign for the senatorship in which, by the nomination of the Republicans, Abraham Lincoln was to be his opponent.