d
more than this; it laid the ax of Anglo-Saxon democracy at the root of
the tree of African slavery.

No man was more sincerely opposed to the annulling of the Missouri
compromise line than myself; but I am free to say, that with my
prejudices in favor of freedom and Free States, and the reputed
sacredness of the Missouri line, I did not look on both sides of the
question. I condemned Mr. Douglas and I condemned him unheard. I have
endeavored to retrieve that error by a more thorough examination, and I
am now convinced that he was in the right and his opponents were in the
wrong, and to that conviction will the nation come at last.

The defeat of Fremont and the condemnation of the Republican or
Philadelphia platform of 1856 by a majority upon the popular vote of
1,371,430 votes, was an unequivocal endorsement by the people, not only
of the compromise of 1850, but of the Kansas and Nebraska bill in its
erasure of the Missouri line. Had James Buchanan been a wise statesman
and a patriot, as I fear he is not; had he carried in his veins "a
single drop of democratic blood," Kansas under the operation of the
principle of non-intervention by Congress, and intervention by its own
people with the question of slavery, would now have been a Free State
within the American Union, the first trophy of legitimate popular
sovereignty, and a great national party with Stephen A. Douglas at its
head would have been existing and triumphant, standing upon firm
constitutional ground, knowing no North and no South, but regarding and
protecting equally the constitutional rights of all the States.

But it was not at once so to be. Mr. Buchanan and Southern statesmen of
ultra views, aided by a few Northern politicians, were infatuated enough
to suppose that the two-edged sword of popular sovereignty that was
sheathed in the Kansas bill, was to be wielded by the Federal
administration, and not by the people of Kansas, and made to cut but one
way and that way in favor of slavery. And they were equally infatuated
when they found that they could not force upon the people of Kansas the
fraudulent Lecompton Constitution, to suppose that the power of
self-government, which had been conceded to the people of the
territories, could be nullified by the dogma of the sovereignty of the
Supreme Court.

Mr. Buchanan and his compeers should have known before they passed the
Kansas bill, that when the people of an American State or territory once
laid th