The extreme opponents of slavery had taken more advanced ground than ever before. They denounced the Fugitive Slave Law as a statute which Congress had no right to enact and which no citizen should obey. They pointed out that it was in violation of that very doctrine of state sovereignty to which the advocates of slavery had appealed. The ultra ones among them planted themselves upon the doctrine first enunciated by Mr. Seward of New York, that there is a "higher law" than the statutes or the Constitution, and that men of enlightened consciences were bound to obey that higher law even to the extent of violating the statutes, and setting the Constitution at naught.
The time had obviously come when there was no longer any use in the adoption of compromises or the passage of conciliatory laws by statesmen whose first concern was for the preservation of the Union. Compromises were no longer binding upon men's consciences or conduct. Political parties refused to regard them and even states in their organized capacity legislated for their nullification, asserting their right of sovereignty to that extent.
It is obvious that peace could not long continue in a country thus violently divided against itself in opinion and sentiment. Sooner or later by one means or another, but with the same certainty that governs the rising and the setting of the sun, such a condition meant war. In this case it meant that within the Union so afflicted there was an "irrepressible conflict" of opinion, a conflict that would yield to no argument, submit itself to no law, accommodate itself to no circumstance and would stoutly insist upon irreconcilable contentions on the one side and the other until the matter should be decided by that last brutal arbitrament of man, a conflict of cannon, musketry, and mortars.
Precisely that condition of affairs had been reached in the United States when the compromise measures of 1850 were repudiated, defied and nullified by both popular and legislative authority. Logically the war between North and South should have occurred then, and undoubtedly it would have occurred at that time but for the persistence of that sentiment of devotion to the Union which still dominated the minds of a majority of men both at the North and at the South.
It was in obedience to that sentiment that statesmen refused to see the hopelessness of the situation and went on endeavoring to find some way out of the difficulty that should bring peace where there was no peace, and save the Union from disruption.
The trouble with all such efforts was that everything proposed by way of placating those on one side of the controversy additionally inflamed those on the other.
The most notable legislative outcome of this vexed situation was the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, for which Senator Douglas made himself sponsor. That bill provided for the erection of the two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, leaving it to those who should settle within that domain to permit or exclude slavery as they might please when the time should come for them to apply for admission to the Union as states. By direct implication at least slaves might freely be taken into those territories during the period of their territorial existence if the settlers there so desired.
In justice to the memory of a patriotic statesman who served his country to the best of his ability, it is only fair that his doctrine and his opinions shall be presented in his own words.
In the speech by which, in 1850, he placated the animosity that had greeted him at Chicago, he set forth his thought as follows:
These measures [the compromise measures of 1850] are predicated upon the great fundamental principle that every people ought to possess the right of framing and regulating their own internal concerns and domestic institutions in their own way.... These things are all confided by the constitution to each state to decide for itself, and I know of no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the territories.