Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

rebuild his strength and his credibility. Swinging back at his critics, Douglas claimed that popular sovereignty would fail only where the ill will of abolitionists and radicals in both North and South made it fail.63

Douglas never doubted that popular sovereignty was the best method for opening the western territories, and he was confident that the soil and climate of Kansas and Nebraska would prove so hostile to slavery that the popular decision of the people of those territories would surely lean toward creating free states. Since that would be a free and open decision by the people of the territories, the Southern radicals would be deprived of any reason for complaint and for further rounds of demands and assurances. If only the agitation of the abolitionists in particular would cease, popular sovereignty could assert its strength and lay to rest the strife of North and South over slavery in the territories.

In Illinois, Douglas was speaking to an audience strongly inclined to agree with him. Illinois was part of the old Northwest, filled both with German immigrants who hated the South for trying to bring black slaves into territories that they desired and with Southern migrants who hated the abolitionists because they feared that emancipation of the slaves would loose free blacks into the territories; both groups feared that the result would be the closing off of the territories to free white labor. Douglas played to the fears of the small farmers and the immigrants, held up popular sovereignty as the only safe method for keeping slavery (and blacks in general) out of the territories, and blamed the uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska bill on the agitators. By October 1854 Douglas had won back the home-state loyalty he had nearly forfeited in ramming Kansas-Nebraska through Congress, and on October 3 he even used the state fair at Springfield, Illinois, as a stage for preaching the gospel of popular sovereignty and Kansas-Nebraska.

One voice was raised in dissent. A Springfield lawyer, a former member of Congress and longtime Whig named Abraham Lincoln, took up Douglas’s defense of Kansas-Nebraska at the Illinois statehouse in Springfield the day after Douglas spoke at the state fair. In the course of a three-hour speech, Lincoln proceeded to tear Kansas-Nebraska and popular sovereignty to shreds. Was popular sovereignty really the most peaceful and effective method for settling the territories? Then why hadn’t the Founding Fathers in 1787 thought of that when they organized the territories in the Northwest? Instead, the Northwest had been declared free territory, and the states of the Northwest did not appear to have suffered for it. “No States in the world have ever advanced as rapidly in population, wealth, the arts and appliances of life… as the very States that were born under the ordinance of ’87, and were deprived of the blessings of ‘popular sovereignty,’ as contained in the Nebraska bill, and without which the people of Kansas and Nebraska cannot get along at all.”64

Lincoln then pinned Douglas on the question of whether popular sovereignty was really going to keep the territories free. “It is vain,” argued Lincoln, to claim that popular sovereignty “gives no sanction or encouragement to slavery.” If he had a field, Lincoln shrewdly remarked, “around which the cattle or the hogs linger and crave to pass the fence, and I go and tear down the fence, will it be supposed that I do not by that act encourage them to enter?” Just so with Kansas-Nebraska: the Missouri Compromise had been the fence that kept slavery out of most of the old Louisiana Purchase, but now came Douglas, tearing down the fence in the name of popular sovereignty and expecting people to believe that slavery would not make every possible effort, climate or not, to camp there. “Even the hogs would know better,” Lincoln sneered.

Most of all, Lincoln condemned popular sovereignty because it tried to dodge the moral issue of slavery. Douglas hoped to pacify Southern anxieties by showing how popular sovereignty gave slavery at least the appearance of a “fair chance” in the territories, and to allay Northern suspicions by pointing to how popular sovereignty was the ultimate expression of liberty. Lincoln did not believe that slavery ever deserved to have a “fair chance,” and even if all the voters of a territory unanimously demanded it, their demanding it did not make it morally right. Liberty was not an end in itself, as popular sovereignty seemed to claim; it was a means, and it was intended to serve the interests of the natural rights that Jefferson had identified in the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Otherwise, liberty would itself be transformed into power, the power of a mob to do whatever it took a fancy to. It was, Lincoln declared, “a descending from the high republican faith of our ancestors” to have the United States government adopt as its territorial policy that nothing should be said or done to inhibit the “free” choice of slavery, “that both are equal with us—that we yield our territories as readily to one as the other!”65 This was not the last time Stephen A. Douglas would hear from the tall Springfield lawyer, and those three themes—the power of Congress over the territories, the incapacity of popular sovereignty to keep slavery from any territory, and the moral injustice of slavery itself—would be Lincoln’s constant hammers at Douglas’s position in Illinois for the next four years.

For the moment, however, Douglas and popular sovereignty faced a more serious challenge than Lincoln, and it came in the form of the United States Supreme Court. In 1834 a United States Army assistant surgeon named John Emerson was transferred from the Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, where he also bought land, and with him he brought his slave Dred Scott. Two years later Emerson was transferred again to Fort Snelling, a frontier army post in what was then still the Wisconsin Territory, and once again he brought Scott with him. In