On the same day that Mr. Douglas presented this second bill, there appeared in the National Era, the Abolition journal at Washington, and in several New York City papers, the noted address, signed by Messrs. Chase, Sumner, Wade, Smith, and De Witt, in which the Douglas bill was denounced in the most trenchant language as "a gross violation of a sacred pledge, as a criminal betrayal of precious rights, as a part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism inhabited by masters and slaves." The contents of this celebrated paper constituted, it may be said, the first draft of the creed of the party to be founded on the doctrine of resistance to slavery extension, the Republican party. The propositions contained in it drove Mr. Douglas to a fierce diatribe against their authors, in which he included an elaborate argument in defence of his dictum, that the Measures of 1850 had rendered the slavery prohibition in the Act of 1820 inoperative. He contended that the fact that Congress had, in the joint resolution admitting Texas, provided that in Texan territory north of the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes slavery should be prohibited, proved that Congress and the people of the United States understood the legislation of 1820 to mean that the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes was to be run through any and all territory that might be subsequently acquired by the United States; that the refusal of Congress to do this in regard to the territory acquired from Mexico had made the establishment of a new principle in regard to slavery in the Territories necessary; that that principle, as established by the legislation of 1850, was the neutrality of Congress in the question, and the right of the residents in each Territory to settle the question for themselves; and that this new principle had superseded the old principle and rendered all legislation under the old principle inoperative.
| Mr. Chase's amendment to the bill. The Southern Whigs aroused by Mr. Wade's accusations. The Douglas doctrine convincing to many. Mr. Chase's amendment lost. |
Such jurisprudence in respect to the effect upon each other of statutes relating to different and distinct Territories had never been heard before, and it was easy to show it to be a tissue of sophistries from beginning to end. It was entirely evident that Mr. Douglas and his committee shrank from proposing a bare and bald repeal of the slavery prohibition in the Act of 1820, and sought to avoid the responsibility of doing so under the convenient claim that it had already been repealed. But Mr. Chase was determined to make them take this responsibility, and to expose their fallacies in their attempts to escape it. On February 3rd, Mr. Chase moved to remove from the bill the words referring to the Measures of 1850, and their effect upon the Act of 1820, and make the bill simply repeal the slavery prohibition of the Act of 1820, in so far as it applied to the Territories to be organized by the bill. Mr. Chase supported his amendment in a powerful speech, in which he demonstrated most clearly the fallacy and the duplicity of the doctrine which held that the legislation of 1850 in regard to Utah and New Mexico had repealed the legislation of 1820 in regard to the Louisiana territory north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes. Both he and his colleague, Mr. Wade, went, however, too far in denouncing the subterfuge as a conspiracy between the Southerners and the friends of Douglas to extend slavery. It was especially imprudent, to say the least, in Mr. Wade to do so. The Southern Whigs were highly incensed at the charge of conspiring with Northern Democrats, made by one of their own party, and they repudiated the accusation with great earnestness. Besides this, the Douglas idea of "popular sovereignty," or, as we now call it, home rule, in the Territories, had won many adherents. There is no question that a great many men, in both the North and the South, now began to feel that Mr. Douglas had discovered the true principle in regard to slavery in the Territories. Mr. Chase's amendment was lost by a vote of thirty to thirteen. The thirteen voting in favor of the amendment were all from the North. Of those voting against it, ten were from the North, and twenty from the South. Nineteen Senators, ten of whom were from the South, did not vote at all. The vote meant that the large majority of those voting held that, in some way or other, the legislation of 1850 had repealed the slavery prohibition in the legislation of 1820. This was execrable jurisprudence, and even Mr. Cass, who was really the father of the idea of home rule in the Territories, dissented from it, and voted for Mr. Chase's amendment.
| Mr. Douglas' last change in the wording of the clause. |
In spite of this support by the majority, Mr. Douglas was apparently disquieted by the attitude of Mr. Cass, and by the arguments against the correctness of his doctrine. He, himself, now moved to strike out of the bill the words: "which was superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, commonly called the Compromise Measures, and is hereby declared inoperative," and to insert instead thereof the words: "which being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by the legislation of 1850, commonly called the Compromise Measures, is hereby declared inoperative and void, it being the true intent and meaning of this Act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."
| Mr. Everett's views. |
In a most able argument, remarkable both for its strong logic and its admirable temper, Mr. Everett demonstrated the weakness of Mr. Douglas' proposition in its last form, the declaration of inconsistency between the legislation of 1820 and that of 1850. He showed conclusively that, in place of an inconsistency, here were simply two policies in reference to different Territories, in which different conditions and relations obtained. He predicted that the insistence upon the same policy for all the Territories would lead to the struggle for determining whether they should be all slave or all free, and he demonstrated that "popular sovereignty" in the Territories was an illusion, since Congress could not by any act of its own divest itself of its duty, laid upon it by the Constitution, to legislate for the Territories. Mr. Everett was a member of the committee on Territories, from which the bill had proceeded, and his views should, on this account, have possessed an added weight.