There was nothing new in the main proposal. A bill to organize this same Territory had passed the House the year before. It was generally conceded that the region ought to have a territorial government. Vast as it was, it had less than a thousand white inhabitants, but the overland route to the Pacific ran across it, and there was sure to be a rapid immigration into it so soon as it should be thrown open to settlers. What was both new and startling was a clause permitting the inhabitants of the Territory, whenever it should be admitted to statehood, to decide for themselves whether they would have slavery or not. The eighth section of the Compromise Act of 1820 provided that slavery should never exist anywhere in the Louisiana Purchase north[Pg 83] of 36° 30′, North latitude, save in the State of Missouri.

In the report which accompanied the bill, Douglas declared that it was based on the principles of the compromise measures of 1850. Those measures, he maintained, affirmed three propositions: questions relating to slavery 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 appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; the mandate of the Constitution concerning fugitive slaves applied to Territories as well as States. Three days later, these propositions were incorporated in the bill.

January 16, Archibald Dixon, a senator from Kentucky, offered an amendment expressly repealing the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law. Douglas remonstrated, but in a few days he called on Dixon, the two senators went for a drive, and in the course of it Douglas promised to accept the amendment. He was satisfied, so Dixon[Pg 84] reported his conversation, that the Missouri Compromise was 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 Sunday, the President granted them an interview. At the end of it, he promised to support the repeal. The next day, Douglas reported a substitute for the Nebraska bill. It provided for two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one; and it declared the eighth section of the Missouri Compromise law to be inoperative because it was "superseded by" the principles of the compromise of 1850.

At the report and the bill in its first form the anti-slavery men in Congress took instant alarm. By the time the substitute was presented, the whole country knew that[Pg 85] something extraordinary was afoot. Without a sign of any popular demand, without preliminary agitation or debate, Douglas, of Illinois, had set himself to repeal the Missouri Compromise. He had undertaken to throw open to slavery a great region long consecrated to freedom. He had written the bill of his own motion, by himself, in his own house. The South had not asked for the concession, the North had not in any wise consented 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 and the pulpit, in petitions to Congress,[Pg 86] in angry protests of public meetings and solemn resolves of legislatures—a hostile and outraged public opinion broke upon Douglas and his bill. His own party could not be held in line. Scores of Democratic newspapers turned against him. Save the legislature of Illinois, no Northern assembly, representative or other, that could speak with any show of authority, dared to support him. No Southern fire-eater was ever half so reviled. He could have traveled from Boston to Chicago, so he afterwards declared, by the light of his own burning effigies.

But the firmest and clearest protest of all came from the sturdy little band of anti-slavery men in Congress. The day after Douglas proposed his substitute, it came up for debate, and Chase, of Ohio, speaking for the opposition, asked for more time to examine the 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[Pg 87] four representatives signed it. They denounced the bill as a breach of faith, infringing the historical compact of 1820, and as part of a plot to extend the area of slavery; and they accused Douglas of hazarding the dearest interests of the American people in a presidential game.

That judgment of him and of the bill was probably accepted by a majority of his contemporaries. For lack of Southern support, he had missed the Democratic nomination in 1852. It seemed clear that whatever Northern candidate 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 State, and Buchanan, in a foreign mission, were both working for the annexation of Cuba, a favorite Southern measure. It was suspected that Cass, old as he was, had it in mind to move the repeal when Douglas went ahead of him.

The contemporaries of Douglas were under a necessity to judge his motives, for they[Pg 88] had to pass upon his fitness for high office and great responsibilities, and no other motive than ambition was so natural and obvious an explanation of his course. But it is questionable if any such positive judgment as was necessary, 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 thought the Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led him into it. It is too much to say he knew it was wrong, and took it solely because he was ambitious.

But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar[Pg 89] from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the bill, to flood the country 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, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well. But[Pg 90] Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."

Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go into any Territory with their property,—a right 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[Pg 91] of the later compromise; and then he added the words, "it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech indeed.

Neither the logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward\'s rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the marvelous readiness, and the headlong force of Douglas. Their set speeches were impressive, but in the quick fire, the question-and-answer, the give-and-take of a free discussion, he was the master of them all. When, half an hour after midnight of the third of March, he rose before[Pg 92] a full Senate and crowded galleries to close the debate, he was at his best. Often interrupted, he welcomed every interruption with courtesy, and never once failed to put his assailant on the defensive. Now Sumner and now Chase was denying that he had come into office by 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[Pg 93] Sumner live there? And he turned upon the senator from Massachusetts: "Sir, you will remember that when you came into the Senate, and sought an opportunity to put forth your abolition incendiarism, you appealed to our sense of justice by the sentiment, \'Strike, but hear me first!\' But when Mr. Webster went back in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but you struck him first." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have never had so much respect for him as I have to-night."

The vote in the Senate was 27 ayes to 14 noes; but in the House the opposition was dangerously strong, and but for the precaution of securing the support of the administration[Pg 94] the bill might have failed. There was a fierce parliamentary battle. Richardson, Douglas\'s friend and chief lieutenant, kept the House in continuous session thirty-six hours trying to force through a motion to fix a term for the debate. Feeling rose on both sides. Personal encounters were imminent. Douglas, in constant attendance, watched every move of the opposition and was instant with the counter-move. It was a month before 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 on the old issue of enmity[Pg 95] to foreigners and Roman Catholics, seemed to stand for the idea that the best way to meet the slavery issue was to run away from it. Another new party, conceived in the spirit of the appeal of the independent Democrats, was struggling to be born. State after State was falling under the power of the Know-Nothings; and those men, Whigs and Democrats alike, who for years had been awaiting an opportunity to fight slavery outside of its breastworks of compromise, were forming at last under the name of Anti-Nebraska men. Before long, they began to call themselves Republicans.

He did not quail. Invited to pronounce the Independence Day oration at Philadelphia, he made of it the first thoroughgoing denunciation of the Know-Nothings that any eminent public man in the country had the courage to make. Democrats everywhere, bewildered by the 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[Pg 96] Democrats firmly into line against the only rivals they had in the South, now that the Whigs were giving up the fight. The campaign was a crucial one, and the Know-Nothings never recovered from their defeat. Douglas\'s course had the merit of consistency as well as courage, for he had always championed the rights of the foreign born.

The Independence Day oration was also his first popular defense of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. But so soon as Congress adjourned he hastened home to face his own people of Illinois. Chicago was once more, as in 1850, a centre of hostility, and he announced that he would speak there 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\'clock until midnight, he stood before them; time and again, as the uproar lessened, his voice combated it; but they would not let him speak.[Pg 97] Nothing, in fact, but his resolute bearing saved him from violence. On the way home, his carriage was se............