xix he was fellow-member with the Whig representative from Sangamon County, Abraham Lincoln, a quaint, ungainly person nearly two feet taller than Douglas, noted at that time for his rugged honesty and his knack at story-telling. Rivals the two men shortly became, but strangely enough, not in politics, but for the hand of Mary Todd, a young woman whom Lincoln subsequently married. Otherwise the race was for long to the swifter Douglas. In 1841, after serving a brief appointment as Secretary of State in Illinois, he was elected by the legislature, when he was twentyeight years old, a justice of the Supreme Court. Two years later, when he was already leader of his party in the state, he entered Congress as a representative. In the House his aggressive energy made an immediate impression. How he appeared as an orator to a contemporary of elegant and classical taste is revealed in a passage in the diary of John Quincy Adams: "His face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial bench and passes for an eloquent orator!" But to other observers he seemed the personification of the virility, the constructive force, and the simplicity of the new and great West. And before he entered the Senate in 1846 he had taken on all the external refinement of Washington life without loss of native strength. From the first he was the exponent of a vigorous foreign policy, and the advocate of internal improvements upon a comprehensive scale. Upon the moral aspect of slavery Douglas was indifferent. He was one of those who could deal with every question concerning it as a question of expediency or of law and precedent." Never in his public career did he admit that slavery was wrong. His opponents asserted, and historians believe, that, while Douglas was animated by a genuine desire for the development of the material resources, and the expansion of the national territory and power of America, he was nevertheless an unsafe guide in the moral issues of politics, either because he was controlled by an overmastering ambition for political power, or because he was incapable of acute moral discernment. Thus appeared Stephen A. Douglas to his contemporaries in 1850. Already he was, at thirty-seven, the guiding spirit of his party in Congress; and for ten years to come he was to be the boldest and most skillful leader, the readiest debater and the most superb fighter in American politics. Throughout that fateful decade he was destined to be the central actor in the mighty national drama. 1 See quotation from J. J. Ampere's Promenade en Amérique, in J. F. Rhodes' History of the United States, Vol. i. p. 245. 66 For four years the country dwelt in comparative freedom from the slavery agitation. Forty-four leading members of Congress from free and slave States alike signed an agreement that they would not support for any office whatever any man who was not known to oppose the renewal, in any form, of agitation upon the subject of slavery." 1 Profoundly unpopular was Sumner's early attempt to revive in Congress the discussion of the Fugitive Slave Law. With the laurels of the achieved compromise bright upon his head, Douglas was a prominent candidate of the younger Democracy for the presidential nomination of 1852. But he, like Cass, his chief rival, lacked Southern support, and the nomination passed to Franklin Pierce. For two years longer quiet prevailed. Suddenly with hardly the shadow of a warning, and according to his subsequent statement, entirely upon his own initative, Douglas on January 4, 1854, reported from the Committee on Territories a bill to organize the territory of Nebraska out of the great area, north and west of Missouri, which lay wholly north of latitude 36° 30'. The startling feature of the proposal was a clause authorizing the people of the proposed territory to decide for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. On January 23, Douglas substituted for this measure the famous Kansas-Nebraska bill, which differed from its predecessor only in two particulars. In its final form 1J. F. Rhodes' History of the United States, Vol. i. p. 207. it affirmed that the slavery restriction of the Missouri Compromise was inconsistent with the principles of the legislation of 1850, and was therefore inoperative and void; and it further divided the territory described in the former bill into two parts, the northern to be called Nebraska, and the southern, Kansas. Throughout the country the measure produced the most violent sensation. To the South it was an enormous concession, for it meant the repeal of the rock-ribbed Missouri Compromise. By inference it opened the whole of the national territory to slavery, subject only to the will of the territorial inhabitants. It meant the abdication by Congress of the right, hitherto never seriously questioned, to exercise absolute authority over the affairs of the territories. In the North no Southern aggression ever provoked such stupendous and unanimous wrath. In mass meetings, in the press and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress, and the protests of legislatures, popular indignation gave a vast and weighty utterance. Except in Illinois, the Democratic party throughout the North at first neither desired nor dared to support Douglas. No political leader was ever more execrated. By his own declaration he could have travelled from Boston to Chicago by the light of his own burning effigies." 1 66 The principle embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska bill was called the principle of "popular sove1 W. G. Brown: Stephen A. Douglas, p. 86. reignty." It was not a new one. In 1847 Lewis Cass had written a letter to one Nicholson in Nashville, Tenn., in which he proposed to settle the slavery question in the territories in a very simple way. It was to permit the people of each territory to determine for themselves whether they should have slavery or not. This plan seemed to accord with the democratic principle of individual liberty which has at all times lain at the foundation of our government. Cass favored it because he did not believe Congress had the right to legislate upon the domestic institutions of the territories, and because the slavery question was exactly of the sort which the people of a territory should determine for themselves. As a solution of the slavery problem "popular sovereignty" evaded all responsibility on the part of the national government for the conduct of domestic affairs in the territories. Douglas early seized upon the principle, made it his own, and to the outbreak of war continued to maintain it in debate, and sought to embody it in legislation. As applied to the state of the slavery question in 1854, "popular sovereignty" was inconsistent with the provisions of the Missouri Compromise, which excluded slavery from all territory north of latitude 30° 30', except in Missouri. It was in conflict also with an extreme Southern doctrine, which maintained that the right to hold slaves as property was one with which neither Congress nor any territorial legislature had the right to interfere. It was |