part of the territory which Douglas proposed to develop lay
within the limits of the Louisiana Purchase and north of latitude 36 deg.
30'. It was therefore free soil by virtue of the Missouri Compromise.
But the Southerners now disputed the validity of that Congressional
enactment, and affirmed their right under the Constitution as they
interpreted it to take and hold their "property" in any territories
belonging to the United States. Douglas had some reason to fear Southern
opposition to his plans on other grounds, for the South would naturally
have preferred that the main road to the Pacific Slope should run from
Tennessee through Arizona and New Mexico to California. If Kansas and
Nebraska were declared closed against slave property their opposition
would be given a rallying cry and would certainly harden. Douglas
therefore proposed a solution which would at any rate get rid of the
Slavery debate so far as Congress was concerned, and which had also a
democratic ring about it acceptable to his Western instincts and, as he
hoped, to his Western following. The new doctrine, called by him that of
"Popular Sovereignty" and by his critics that of "Squatter Sovereignty,"
amounted to this: that the existing settlers in the territories
concerned should, in the act of forming their territorial governments,
decide whether they would admit or exclude Slavery.

It was a plausible doctrine; but one can only vindicate Douglas's
motives, as I have endeavoured to do, at the expense of his judgment,
for his policy had all the consequences which he most desired to avoid.
It produced two effects which between them brought the sectional quarrel
to the point of heat at which Civil War became possible and perhaps
inevitable. It threw the new territories down as stakes to be scrambled
for by the rival sections, and it created by reaction a new party,
necessarily sectional, having for its object the maintenance and
reinforcement of the Missouri Compromise. It will be well to take the
two points separately.

Up to the passing of Kansas and Nebraska Law, these territories had been
populated exactly as such frontier communities had theretofore been
populated, by immigrants from all the States and from Europe who mingled
freely, felt no ill-will to each other, and were early consolidated by
the fact of proximity into a homogeneous community. But from the moment
of its passage the whole situation was altered. It became a political
object to bot