Early in his Senatorial career Mr. Chandler became convinced that the purpose of rebellion was a well-defined one at the South, that preparations to make it successful were in active progress, and that the longer the crisis was delayed the more difficult would be the task of its suppression. Between 1857 and 1861 his comments to his intimate friends on the outlook were exceedingly gloomy, and he often declared that he saw no possible escape from war. If the government was to be maintained on the basis on which it was founded and was not to be revolutionized in the interest of slavery, he believed that an armed conflict with the men who had determined to change its character was inevitable. He did not underestimate their ambition, their desperateness of purpose, or their readiness for violence. But neither in public nor in private did he quail before them in any degree, and his only plan of action was the simple, straightforward and characteristic one of meeting their threats with defiance and their treason with all the force required for its punishment. In a time of vacillation, feebleness and moral cowardice, and while he was still new in the Senate and hampered by his own inexperience and the usages of that body, what he did say and all his acts and influence were important contributions to that invigorating of Northern sentiment which the times so greatly demanded and which alone made possible the national uprising of 1861. As a matter of record, the first time Zachariah Chandler's voice was heard in the Senate chamber, he asked that "Cornelius O'Flynn have leave to withdraw his memorial and papers from the files of the Senate." The first caucus he attended was that in which the Republican minority decided to make a vigorous protest against the unfairness of its treatment in the appointment of the Senate committees of the Thirty-fifth Congress. In his first speech he added, on the floor of the Senate, to the protest of his party an equally vigorous remonstrance against the complete ignoring of the commercial importance of the Northwest in the selection of members of the Committee on Commerce. In his second speech (on the proposition to increase the army) he said in significant language: "If they will show to me that they require a force in Utah to put down rebellion I will vote for it, I care not whether it be one regiment or one hundred regiments." His first prepared address in the Senate was delivered on the 12th day of March, 1858, and had as its theme that most reckless of the slave power's efforts at self-extension, the attempt to force upon Kansas what was known as the Lecompton constitution.