When Douglas rose to address the Senate on the English bill, April 29th, he betrayed some of the emotion under which he had made his decision. He confessed an "anxious desire" to find such provisions as would permit him to support the bill; but he was painfully forced to declare that he could not find the principle for which he had contended, fairly carried out. He was unable to reconcile popular sovereignty with the proposed intervention of Congress in the English bill. "It is intervention with inducements to control the result. It is intervention with a bounty on the one side and a penalty on the other."[[664]] He frankly admitted that he did not believe there was enough in the bounty nor enough in the penalty to influence materially the vote of the people of Kansas; but it involved "the principle of freedom of election and—the great principle of self-government upon which our institutions rest." And upon this principle he took his stand. "With all the anxiety that I have had," said he with deep feeling, "to be able to arrive at a conclusion in harmony with the overwhelming majority of my political friends in Congress, I could not bring my judgment or conscience to the conclusion that this was a fair, impartial, and equal application of the principle."[[665]]
As though to make reconciliation with the administration impossible, Douglas went on to express his distrust of the provision of the bill for a board of supervisors of elections. Instead of a board of four, two of whom should represent the Territory and two the Federal government, as the Crittenden bill had provided, five were to constitute the board, of whom three were to be United States officials. "Does not this change," asked Douglas significantly, "give ground for apprehension that you may have the Oxford, the Shawnee, and the Delaware Crossing and Kickapoo frauds re-enacted at this election?"[[666]] The most suspicions Republican could hardly have dealt an unkinder thrust.
There could be no manner of doubt as to the outcome of the English bill in the Senate. Douglas, Stuart, and Broderick were the only Democrats to oppose its passage, Pugh having joined the majority. The bill passed the House also, nine of Douglas's associates in the anti-Lecompton fight going over to the administration.[[667]] Douglas accepted this defection with philosophic equanimity, indulging in no vindictive feelings.[[668]] Had he not himself felt misgivings as to his own course?
By midsummer the people of Kansas had recorded nearly ten thousand votes against the land ordinance and the Lecompton constitution. The administration had failed to make Kansas a slave State. Yet the Supreme Court had countenanced the view that Kansas was legally a slave Territory. What, then, became of the great fundamental principle of popular sovereignty? This was the question which Douglas was now called upon to answer.
FOOTNOTES:
[621] Report of the Covode Committee, pp. 105-106; Cutts, Constitutional and Party Questions, p. 111; Speech of Douglas at Milwaukee, Wis., October 14, 1860, Chicago Times and Herald, October 17, 1860.
[622] Spring, Kansas, p. 213; Rhodes, History of the United States, II, p. 274.
[623] Rhodes, History of the United States, II, pp. 277-278.
[624] Ibid., pp. 278-279; Spring, Kansas, p. 223.