If this be true, it was a most reprehensible trick of unscrupulous politics. Mr. Seward scoffed at the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" in the Territories as arrant nonsense, and knew that the assertion of any such doctrine as a principle of the law of the country in respect to Territorial organization would rouse the North to angry and bitter resistance. What he did, he did with his eyes open. His vision did not probably reach so far as to civil war, but he knew that the risks of another slavery agitation were very grave. Neither could the ambiguity in Mr. Douglas' bill, and the necessity for relieving it of this obscurity, palliate such an offense. If he desired to make Mr. Douglas' bill entirely plain he should have done this, not by holding out a temptation to the South to enter upon a new course of slavery extension, but by an amendment asserting the continuing validity of the slavery prohibition in the Act of 1820. Mr. Sumner did this very thing on the next day. It was, however, too late to chain the spirit which Dixon's fatal move had loosed.
| Douglas and Dixon. |
It is said that Mr. Douglas was surprised and disconcerted by Mr. Dixon's notice, and endeavored to dissuade him from carrying out his expressed intention, but was finally convinced by Mr. Dixon that the proposed amendment was only the fair and honest statement of constitutional principles, and of the legal results of the Compromise of 1850, and only made distinct and express what was unclear, though implied, in the bill.
| Mr. Douglas' new bill. |
On the 23rd, Mr. Douglas brought in a new bill, and offered it as a substitute for the original bill. The new bill contained a clause declaring that that part of the Act of 1820 prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana territory above thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes was inoperative, being contrary to, and superseded by, the principles of the legislation of 1850. Mr. Douglas' new bill changed the southern boundary from thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes to thirty-seven degrees, made the northern boundary run up to the forty-ninth parallel west of Minnesota Territory, and cut this vast domain of nearly five hundred thousand square miles in area into two Territories by the fortieth parallel of latitude, the one to the north of it to be called Nebraska, and the one to the south of it Kansas. Mr. Dixon immediately expressed himself as satisfied with the provisions of the new bill, and said that they fulfilled the purposes of the amendment which he had intended to offer, and that he should, therefore, withhold the same. The Senate agreed to take up the bill on the following Monday.
| The Free-soil protest against the bill. Mr. Douglas' reply to the address. |