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It is well not to impute too much importance to the ingenious sophisms of party platforms, but most of them bear unconscious testimony to the dominant notions of their day. Each party was seeking to give administrative utterance to the law of the Constitution, and when successful at the polls, interpreted its clauses as an exposition of a party policy. Its interpretation may be read, in part, in the statute book. The three great questions which arose during the first sixty years of the Constitution,—the tariff, the bank and internal improvements were included in Marshall's decisions, and the constitutionality of each was sustained. It is forgotten now, when these three issues have long been settled and have become a part of the fixed public policy of the country, that at one time they were mere propositions, abstract questions of right under the Constitution, and later, great issues between great parties. The practice of the country has sustained the principle at the base of each of them as laid down by Marshall. The enemies of the bank, of the protective system and of internal improvements would undoubtedly be amazed, could they return to the scene of their activities and witness the triumph of ideas which they so bitterly opposed. The Nemesis of politics at last overtook the cherished policy of the opponents of these distinctive features of American political institutions. More amazing was the fate of slavery, which delayed during the strident years, from the Revolution to the great Compromise, was only the more sudden when it came.

Our review of the law of the Constitution as laid down from the inception of the government to the adoption of the Compromise of 1850 prepares the way for the account of the repeal of that compromise and the events which led up to the abolition of slavery.

CHAPTER IV.

THE COMPROMISE REPEALED.

The discovery of gold on the Pacific coast in 1849 turned the tide of immigration into the West, and was one of the principal causes which led to the Compromise of 1850; but the insatiable demands of slavocracy soon forced its repeal. For a few years St. Louis was the principal point from which pioneers set forth for California, but by 1850 an overland route had been opened from Chicago through Iowa and the Nebraska country. Over the Nebraska region there was neither territorial nor State government. But many immigrants preferred to seek their fortunes among the rich bottom lands of Nebraska than to waste them in the gold mines, and in consequence many settlements sprang up along the Nebraska and Kansas rivers. By 1854 population there was sufficient to receive the attention of Congress, and a bill was introduced in the Senate to establish the territory of Nebraska. It was referred to the Committee on Territories, of which Stephen A. Douglas was chairman, and on the fourth of January he reported a substitute for the bill, of which the most important matter was its repeal of the compromise of 1820. It set up the ingenious theory that the Missouri Compromise was repealed by that of 1850; that the line 36° 30', dividing free from slave soil west of the Mississippi, had been abolished, and that it was a disputed point whether slavery was prohibited in the Nebraska country by valid enactment. This was reviving the old question of the constitutional power of Congress to regulate the domestic institutions of the territories. While claiming no desire to enter into the discus

THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL.

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sion of this controverted question, the committee made an exposition of the Compromise of 1850, which, it said, rested upon three propositions; that all questions pertaining to slavery in the territories and in new States to be formed from them were to be left to the decision of the people residing in them; secondly, that all cases involving title to slaves and questions of personal freedom were to be decided by local tribunals with the right to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; and thirdly, that the fugitive slave act of 1850 should be as faithfully executed in the territories as in the States.1

Douglas wished the Missouri restrictions on slavery declared inoperative and void, but his motion was lost, though the Senate struck out the passage in the original bill, that the Missouri restriction was superseded by the principle of the compromise of 1850. Not satisfied with this, Douglas, on the fifteenth of February, succeeded in substituting a provision that the Missouri restriction, the line of 36° 30', was inconsistent with the Compromise of 1850, therefore, void; it being the true purpose of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, he said, neither to legislate slavery into the territory, nor to exclude it from it, but to leave the people free to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States. Senator Chase, of Ohio, attempted to amend further by adding that the people of the territory, if they saw fit, might prohibit slavery through their representatives, but this was rejected,2 and instead, the Senate added a proviso that the bill should not be construed as putting in force any law which existed before the Missouri Compromise, either establishing or abolishing slavery.

1 Senate report, Thirty-third Congress, first session, Vol. I, No. 15.

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TWO BILLS PASSED.

Senator Seward, who quickly detected in the bill a cunning device for establishing slavery in Nebraska, delivered a powerful speech against it; which in breadth and scope of its appeal for freedom equaled his speech against the Compromise of 1850. But his objections were overruled and the bill passed the Senate.1 In the House a separate bill for Nebraska had been introduced in December,2 but on the thirty-first of January, the Committee on Territories reported a bill organizing Kansas and Nebraska in one act. It was the Douglas bill in substance. An unsuccessful attempt was made to incorporate the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, by authorizing the inhabitants of the territories to determine the question of slavery for themselves. On the second of May, the House passed the bill, the majority in its favor being from slave States. It was sent to the Senate, which accepted it as a substitute for its own measure, passed it on the twenty-fourth and sent it to the President. He speedily approved it.3 It extended the fugitive slave act over Kansas and Nebraska; declared the Missouri Compromise inconsistent with the principles of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and territories as recognized by the Compromise of 1850, and left the question of slavery to be settled by the inhabitants of the territories in their own

way.

While the bill was in Congress, the leaders of the party opposed to slavery in Nebraska, calling themselves, at the time, Independent Democrats, issued an appeal to the country protesting against the bill. This appeal was essentially to the higher law of the Constitution. While arraigning the bill as a menace to free institutions and

1 March 3, 1854.

2 December 22, 1853.

3 May 30, 1854; Statutes at Large, X, 277.

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a violation of the two great compromises on slavery which had been made, it did not rest its objections on these, but on the economic effects of the proposed law. The region to be affected by it was more than twelve times as great as that of Ohio. It occupied the very heart of the continent, and excluding California, was larger than all the existing free States. This was to be appointed to slavery. Its clear violation of the Missouri Compromise was in the face of the opinions of President Monroe and his cabinet, who, though most of them were from slave-holding States, had affirmed its constitutionality. The defenders of the bill claimed that the Nebraska territory sustained the same relations to slavery as did the territory acquired from Mexico prior to 1850, therefore, that the pro-slavery clauses of the bill were necessary to carry into effect the compromises of that year. This assertion, the protest declared, was groundless. The acts permitting slavery in the region acquired from France, Spain and Mexico, were never supposed to have abrogated or affected the existing exclusion of slavery from Nebraska. But the strength of the appeal did not lie in its claim that the bill would be unconstitutional, but in its portrayal of the economic evils which it embodied.

A railroad to the Pacific had already been proposed and two of the principal routes, the northern and the central, traversed the Nebraska territory. If slavery was allowed there, the settlement and cultivation of the country would be greatly retarded. Inducements to free laborers and immigrants would be almost destroyed. The cost of constructing the railroad would be increased and its prospective profits necessarily so cut down as to make its construction practically impossible. Even if the road was made, the difficulty and expense of keeping it up in