In 1854 Mr. Douglas carried through the Congress of the United States and through a parliamentary warfare, in which no other man than he could have triumphed, the bill to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, declaring inoperative and void the Missouri geographical compromise line, and affirming the true intent and meaning of the Kansas and Nebraska act to be, "to leave the people of any State or territory perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."
In this short "stump speech in the belly of the bill," as Thomas H. Benton and Republican orators after him have, by way of ridicule, been pleased to call it, is the key to the law which must ever govern its true interpretation, and it puts to the rout all the arguments that have been made to prove that non-intervention and popular or territorial sovereignty are not in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, except in small fractions.
A measure so radical and far-reaching as the formal annulling of the Missouri compromise line, could not fail to meet at first with terrific opposition. It broke in on old habits and ways of thinking—it stirred up men's opinions to the roots—it took thought from the surface and forms of things to their substance—it brought democracy to the test. It put to the nation the pregnant questions: Are the rights of white men and black men, the claims of freedom and humanity to be trusted to the white men of the American territories, as well as American States, or are they not? Are free white American citizens in American territories, as well as American States, competent to decide the question of African slavery or not? Are they competent to govern themselves or not? It did more than this; it laid the ax of Anglo-Saxon democracy at the root of the tree of African slavery.
No man was more sincerely opposed to the annulling of the Missouri compromise line than myself; but I am free to say, that with my prejudices in favor of freedom and Free States, and the reputed sacredness of the Missouri line, I did not look on both sides of the question. I condemned Mr. Douglas and I condemned him unheard. I have endeavored to retrieve that error by a more thorough examination, and I am now convinced that he was in the right and his opponents were in the wrong, and to that conviction will the nation come at last.
The defeat of Fremont and the condemnation of the Republican or Philadelphia platform of 1856 by a majority upon the popular vote of 1,371,430 votes, was an unequivocal endorsement by the people, not only of the compromise of 1850, but of the Kansas and Nebraska bill in its erasure of the Missouri line. Had James Buchanan been a wise statesman and a patriot, as I fear he is not; had he carried in his veins "a single drop of democratic blood," Kansas under the operation of the principle of non-intervention by Congress, and intervention by its own people with the question of slavery, would now have been a Free State within the American Union, the first trophy of legitimate popular sovereignty, and a great national party with Stephen A. Douglas at its head would have been existing and triumphant, standing upon firm constitutional ground, knowing no North and no South, but regarding and protecting equally the constitutional rights of all the States.
But it was not at once so to be. Mr. Buchanan and Southern statesmen of ultra views, aided by a few Northern politicians, were infatuated enough to suppose that the two-edged sword of popular sovereignty that was sheathed in the Kansas bill, was to be wielded by the Federal administration, and not by the people of Kansas, and made to cut but one way and that way in favor of slavery. And they were equally infatuated when they found that they could not force upon the people of Kansas the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution, to suppose that the power of self-government, which had been conceded to the people of the territories, could be nullified by the dogma of the sovereignty of the Supreme Court.
Mr. Buchanan and his compeers should have known before they passed the Kansas bill, that when the people of an American State or territory once laid their hands upon the power to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, they held the power upon which free institutions and slave institutions alike rested in the American States, and that that power and its free exercise could never be taken from the people by any Supreme Court or the dogma of any political party, and any systematized attempt to take it away would be met by resistance that would shiver the Union to fragments. The sovereignty of the people or true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful sovereignty of the States, either in the Union or in the territories, has taken root and settled into a well-defined opinion in the popular mind, the courts must let it alone; it is for them then to follow the popular will, not to lead it. Law is the voice of the people. Let the courts that assume to be the oracles of the law, see to it that they mistake not the people's voice, especially on those great political questions that touch the fountains of a nation's life.
The attempt of Mr. Buchanan's administration to force slavery upon Kansas by means of the Lecompton Constitution, against the real sentiment of the people, and against the true intent and meaning of the organic law of Kansas, and failing in that, the attempt to override the principle of popular sovereignty, by means of a false construction of the Dred Scott decision, roused to renewed zeal and combined all the Northern elements of opposition to slavery, and in the excitement of angry passion that has followed, the great compromise of 1850, and the true character of that measure, and its legitimate consequent, the erasure of the Missouri compromise line, have been obscured in the public mind, and both have lost their hold upon the calm judgments of the people. Why is this? Are not the laws that now stand upon the statute book of the nation, as the compromise measures of 1850, the same as they were in 1852, when they were endorsed by nearly 3,000,000 of votes—almost the unanimous vote of the nation? Is the law of the Kansas and Nebraska act, annulling the Missouri compromise line, a different law from what it was in 1856, when it was triumphantly sustained against Fremont and the Philadelphia platform? No man can say the laws are not the same. As they were then, so are they now. If right in principle and good then, they are equally right and good now. Were the people senseless or did they mean nothing when they endorsed those laws? No man dare say that. Why is it then that the Democratic party, which triumphed in 1852 and in 1856 on these very measures, is now a divided and broken army and almost panic-stricken, and its opponents, the advocates of Congressional prohibition of slavery, with a man at their head without a record as a statesman and almost unknown to the nation, carrying in their train all the fiercest elements of anti-slavery agitation, are already boasting of sure success? No satisfactory answer can be given to these questions, except the fact that the administration of James Buchanan, false to the principles on which it was placed in power, has attempted by intervention in favor of slavery, to destroy the very principle which is the life of the compromise of 1850 and of the Kansas and Nebraska law of 1854. Those great measures and their ablest and most consistent champion, have alike been stabbed in the house of their friends. By the course of the Buchanan administration, the people of the North have been made to believe that the principle of non-intervention is a sham; that the compromise of 1850 and the erasure of the Missouri line in 1852 were fraudulent schemes to cheat the people into a consent to extend slavery all over the national territory; and the cry is echoed all through the North: the nation's plighted faith is broken, the landmarks of freedom are removed, the barbarism of slavery will spread over the land! Is there reason in this cry, for argument it cannot be called? There is none. Why the very fact that the acts of the Federal executive have had power to produce this strange delusion and wild commotion of the public mind, is itself a potent argument for holding fast to the principle of the compromise of 1850, and rallying the people again to its support, so that the President and the Congress may no longer disturb the people by tampering with the local question of slavery. Again I say, there is nothing in this cry of the extension of the barbarism of slavery; it is as senseless as it is dangerous to the nation's peace. All that is is done by the legislation of 1850 and 1854, is to establish a governing principle in regard to slavery in the territories, which is exactly the same as the principle which governs slavery in the States under the Constitution. The laws of 1850 and 1854 plant slavery no where, nor do they extend it any where into the national domain. They leave the national territory free.
What better authority can we have on this point than that of Henry Clay, whose influence perhaps as much as that of any other man, helped to carry the compromise of 1850? Did he mean in voting for that compromise, by which the principle of non-intervention was adopted as to territory both North and South of the Missouri compromise line of 36 deg. 30 min., to extend slavery into such territory? Hear what he said on the question in the Senate of the United States. He said in answer to a demand of Jefferson Davis for a positive provision for the admission of slavery south of the Missouri compromise line:—"Coming as I do from a Slave State, it is my solemn, deliberate and well-matured determination that no power—no earthly power—shall compel me to vote for the positive introduction of slavery either south or north of that line. Sir, while you reproach, and justly too, our British ancestors for the introduction of this institution upon the continent of America, I am, for one, unwilling that the posterity of the present inhabitants of California and New Mexico shall reproach us for doing just what we reproach Great Britain for doing to us. If the citizens of those territories choose to establish slavery, I am for admitting them with such provisions in their constitutions; but then it will be their own work and not ours, and their posterity will have to reproach them and not us, for forming constitutions allowing the institution of slavery to exist among them." In the same paragraph, Mr. Clay further says, "I believe that slavery no where exists within any portion of the territory acquired by us from Mexico." So much for the testimony of Henry Clay! Now, who shall say that the compromise of 1850 was a law to extend slavery over the free territory covered by it? and if not, then for the same reason, the Kansas and Nebraska act was not a law for extending slavery over the free territory north of the Missouri line. What the law of 1850 did for the territory acquired from Mexico, the same did the law of 1854 do for the Louisiana territory acquired from France. No man can show a substantial difference, except that the Kansas and Nebraska law more clearly recognizes the right of the people to decide the question of slavery. Again, I would ask of the men who make this cry of the extension of slavery, to answer in candor: If the Missouri line was a landmark for freedom, was it not also a landmark for slavery? Was not the country south of 36 deg. 30 min., under the law of March 6th 1820, as impliedly devoted to slavery as the country north of it was to freedom? Up to 1848, when California, to which northern men had been led, not more by the love of freedom than by the lust of gold, had declared herself a Free State, had a Free State ever been made south of the Missouri line? Was it not the almost sure result of that line to prevent men who favor Free States from going south of it to demonstrate by experience that Free States could grow and prosper even in a southern clime? Had free labor a fair chance to raise its standard in the south, and try its strength beneath a burning sun, so long as Congress had virtually doomed the land of the south to slave labor, by declaring that the region of free land and free labor was north of the Missouri line? Is it not slavery rather than freedom that needs the protection of positive law? Does the north, guarded as it is by nature's irrepealable law, and by the self-poised and self-reliant strength of its freeborn sons, need the Federal power to guard its soil from the feet of slaves? Is slavery more progressive and expansive than freedom? and are the men who form Free States afraid to meet the men who form Slave States on common ground and take an even chance for control? In a word, do the men who build up free institutions need any thing more from the Federal government than that it should place in their hands the ax and the sword of democracy, and let them alone?
It is astonishing to me that men who profess the sentiments expressed by conservative men of the Republican party, if they are sincere in their desire that slavery should die out, should fail to see that the compromise of 1850 and the Kansas and Nebraska law are alike based upon the only principle by which the ultimate extinction of slavery on this continent must take place. All that freedom needed, and all that it could constitutionally claim, was the withdrawal of the national intervention in favor of slavery, which intervention existed so long as a geographical line marked out by Congress existed over the national domain to separate Free and Slave States; and the leaving of the question of slavery to the local legislatures; by them only had it been or could it be created, and by them only had it been or could it be abolished. When the national territory was made free by the law of non-intervention, slavery was left entirely to the local law, and as freedom is the rule and slavery the exception, the chances were three to one in favor of free institutions in every new State.