nceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overla

hood, to decide for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided

ery in the Territories and in States to be formed out of them should be left to the people thereof; cases involving title to slaves and questions of personal freedom should be left to the local courts, with a right of

unconstitutional and that it was unfair to the South. "This proceeding," he said, "may end my political career, but, acting under the sense of duty which animates me, I am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do it." January 22, with several other congressmen, he called on Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, and was by him conducted to the White House. Contrary to his usage, for it was Su

sented to it. For a little while, in fact, the Southern leaders seemed to distrust the bill, for they distrusted Douglas; one or two of them, like Sam Houston, of Texas, resisted it to the last, declaring it was sure in the end to do the South more harm than good. But for the most part they came quickly into line behind Douglas, though they never generally accepted his principle of popular sovereignty. As to the North, the challenge of the Kansas-Nebraska bill met there with such a response as no Southern aggression had yet provoked. Through every avenue of expression-through the press

he new provisions. Douglas granted a week, and the next day there appeared in various newspapers an address to the country entitled "An Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress." Chase was the principal author of it; he and Sumner and four representative

the South should prefer would be nominated in 1856. His rivals were all, in one way or another, commending themselves to the South. Pierce was hand in glove with Davis and other Southern leaders. Marcy, in the Department of

ecessary, and therefore right, in his contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once th

with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850 repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,-the principle of "popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past; it

ht with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas, however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by" the principles of the later compromise; and then he added the words, "it being the true intent and mea

y a sacrifice of principle; now Seward was defending his own State of New York against a charge of infidelity to the compact of 1820; now Everett, friend and biographer and successor of Webster, was protesting that he had not meant to misrepresent Webster's views. Always, after these encounters, Douglas knew how to come back, with a graver tone, to the larger issue, as if they, and not he, were trying to obscure it. A spectator might have fancied that these high-minded men were culprits, and he their inquisitor. Now and then, as when he dealt with the abolitionists, there was no questioning the sincerity of his feeling, and it stirred him to a genuine eloquence. He was not surprised that Boston burned him in effigy. Had not Boston closed her Faneuil Hall upon the aged Webster? Did not Sumner live there? And he turne

fore the bill could be brought to a vote, and then it passed, with a slight change, by a majority of thirteen. At the end of May, the President signed it, and Douglas, turning from the work of enacting it into law to the harder task of defending it before the country, beheld the whole field of national politics transformed. The Whig party, crushed to earth in 1852, made no move to take a stand on the new issue; it was dead. His own historical Democratic party was everywhere throughout the North in a turmoil that seemed to forebode dissolution. One new party, sprung swiftly and secretly into life

e mystery in which these new adversaries shrouded their designs, were heartened to an aggressive warfare. Some months later, he took the stump in Virginia, where Henry A. Wise had brought the Democrats firmly into line against the only rivals they had in the Sout

the evening of September first. When the time came, flags at half mast and the dismal tolling of church bells welcomed him. A vast and ominously silent crowd was gathered, but not to hear him. Hisses and groans broke in upon his opening sentences. Hour after hour, from eight o'clo

for state treasurer was elected. The Know-Nothings and Anti-Nebraska men got a majority of the congressmen, and by the defection of certain state senators who held over from a previous election they were enabled to send Lyman Trumbull, Anti-Nebraska Democrat, to be Douglas's colleague at Washington. That, when compared with the results elsewhere in the North, was a striking proof of Douglas's power with his people. Moreover, t

. The Southerners, aided by colonized voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus established, gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State. When a new Congress assembled in December, 1855, there were two governments in Kansas, and the people were separated into hostile camps. Brawls were

ead, a bill providing for the admission of Kansas, so soon as her population should reach 93,000, which would entitle her to one representative in Congress, with such constitution as her people might lawfully adopt. The House, with an anti-slavery majority, was for admitting Kansas at once with the Topeka constitution. So was the anti-slavery group in the Senate, now swelled into a strong minority. In the fierce debate that followed, Douglas had to defend the results, as well as the theory, of his law. Sumner was the bitterest of his assailants, and t

portant. Buchanan was the choice of the Northern delegates because he was a Pennsylvanian and because, abroad on a foreign mission, he had escaped all responsibility for Kansas. On the first ballot, he led with 135 votes, Pierce was second with 122, and Douglas had but 33, but as before he rose as the balloting proceeded. Pierce's vote fell away; after the

Georgia, offered an enabling act of admirable fairness, intended to secure the people of Kansas in their right to have such a state constitution as they might prefer, and Douglas adopted it and held the Senate for it against the House bill to admit Kansas with the Topeka constitution. No agreement could be reached, for the Republicans in their platform had declared for the prohibition of slavery in all the Territories. "Bleeding Kansas

ing sense of danger to the Union which worked contrary to the angry revolt against the slave power, and Buchanan's appeal to the lovers of the Union in both sect

hment with the South, ventured far enough to accept. The court decided that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes when it declared all men to be equal; that no negro could become a citizen of the United States; that the right of property in slaves was affirmed in the Constitution; and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any Territory. The announcement that the eighth clause of the Missouri Compromise law was unconstitutional was acceptable enough to the man who had accomplished its repeal, but what became of popular sovereignty if the Constitution itself decreed slavery into the Territori

own itself stronger than slavery. Robert J. Walker, a slaveholder, whom Buchanan and Douglas had persuaded to accept the governorship, reported that the Free-Soilers outnumbered their adversaries three to one. The legislature had provided for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, and when the question of submitting the constitution to the people arose, the governor, an upright man, promptly announced that it would be submitted, and the administration sustained him. Many Free-Soilers, however, made the mistake of sta

outh and what was left of his principle of popular sovereignty, he remonstrated angrily with the President for breaking faith with Walker and the Kansans. At the end of a stormy interview, Buchanan, stirred out of his wonted placidity, threateningly reminded the senator that no Democrat ever broke with a Democratic administration without being

associates in the Senate, but two or three were brave enough to follow him. Moreover, the panic had swept away his wealth. He was near the end of his term of office, and the trend in Illinois was toward the Republicans. The long tide which had so steadily borne him on to fortun

e?lection to the Senate. But as the debate progressed, and his name kept appearing on the same side with Sumner's and Seward's in the divisions, another notion spread. Horace Greeley and other Republicans

ey ratified it he would accept that. Ratified it was at the absurd election the convention had ordered, for the great majority of the settlers could not vote their opposition, but when the legislature, now Free-Soil, took the authority to submit it as a whole, the majority against it by far exceeded the highest total of votes the pro-slavery men had ever mustered. Nevertheless, the Senate passed it, Douglas and three other Democrats voting in the negative. His following in the House was greater,

ed him. But there awaited him treason in the ranks of his own party,-for the administration, beaten in Congress, attacked him at home,-and an opposition now completely formed and led by a man whom Douglas himself, in his own he