1. The Compromise of 1850 did not settle the question of slavery in the territories, and an attempt to organize Kansas and Nebraska brought it up again.
2. In the organization of these territories a new political doctrine, "popular sovereignty," was announced.
3. This was applied in Kansas, and the struggle for Kansas began. The first territorial government was proslavery. The antislavery men then made a constitution (Topeka) and formed a free state government. Thereupon the proslavery men formed a constitution (Lecompton) for a slave state. This was submitted to Congress and rejected, and Kansas remained a territory till 1861.
4. In the course of the struggle for free soil in Kansas the Whig party went to pieces, the Democratic was split into two wings, and the Know-nothing or Native American party and the Republican party arose.
5. The Republican party was defeated in 1856, but the Dred Scott decision in 1857 and the continued struggle in Kansas forced the question of slavery to the front, and in 1860 Lincoln was elected.
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CHAPTER XXVI
PROGRESS IN THE UNITED STATES BETWEEN 1840 AND 1860
[Illustration: Chicago in 1832]
%403. The Movement of Population.%—The twenty years which elapsed between the election of Harrison, in 1840, and the election of Lincoln, in 1860, had seen a most astonishing change in our country. In 1840 neither Texas, nor the immense region afterwards acquired from Mexico, belonged to us. There were then but twenty-six states and five territories, inhabited by 17,000,000 people, of whom but 876,000 lived west of the Mississippi River, mostly close to the river bank in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The great Northwest was still a wilderness, and many a city now familiar to us had no existence. Toledo and Milwaukee and Indianapolis had each less than 3000 inhabitants; Chicago had less than 5000; and Cleveland, Columbus, and Detroit, each less than 10,000. Yet the rapid growth of cities had been one of the characteristics of the period 1830 to 1840.