esidential campaign of 1852 each party felt compelled to declare
emphatically--what all wise politicians knew to be false--the "finality"
of the great Compromise of 1850. Never, never more was there to be a
revival of the slavery agitation! Yet, at the same time, it was
instinctively felt that the concord would cease at once if the nation
should not give to the South a Democratic President! In this campaign
Lincoln made a few speeches in Illinois in favor of Scott; but Herndon
says that they were not very satisfactory efforts. Franklin Pierce was
chosen, and slavery could have had no better man.

This doctrine of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the
Territories lay as the seed of mortal disease imbedded in the vitals of
the great Compromise even at the hour of its birth. All the howlings of
the political medicine-men in the halls of Congress, and in the wigwams
where the party platforms were manufactured, could not defer the
inevitable dissolution. The rapid peopling of the Pacific coast already
made it imperative to provide some sort of governmental organization for
the sparsely inhabited regions lying between these new lands and the
fringe of population near the Mississippi. Accordingly bills were
introduced to establish as a Territory the region which was afterward
divided between Kansas and Nebraska; but at two successive sessions they
failed to pass, more, as it seemed, from lack of interest than from any
open hostility. In the course of debate it was explained, and not
contradicted, that slavery was not mentioned in the bills because the
Missouri Compromise controlled that matter. Yet it was well known that
the Missouri Compromise was no longer a sure barrier; for one wing of
the pro-slavery party asserted that it was unconstitutional on the
ground that slaves, being property, could not be touched in the
Territories by congressional enactments; while another wing of the party
preferred the plausible cry of "popular sovereignty," than which no
words could ring truer in American ears; and no one doubted that, in
order to give that sovereignty full sway, they would at any convenient
moment vote to repeal even the "sacred" Compromise. It could not be
denied that this was the better course, if it were practicable; and
accordingly, January 16, 1854, Senator Dixon of Kentucky offered an
amendment to the pending Nebraska bill, which substantially embodied the
repeal. In the Senate Douglas was chairman of the Co