ich Jefferson had coined,
dropping the word "national" out. Douglas, enraged by this blasphemy
against Jefferson, suggested that the word "black" be put in where
"national" had been left out, making the name Black Republican party.

A year later Douglas put through his bill for the organization of Kansas
and Nebraska, which provided that they could come into the Union with or
without slavery as they chose. He had long before voted against slavery
prohibition in Texas; for the extension of the Missouri Compromise to
the Pacific; for the Compromises of 1850, which made California free and
left Utah and New Mexico to come in free or slave, according to their
own wish. I had to confess that he had no clear constitutional theory
himself. He was only growing more emphatic in favor of popular
sovereignty as a name for territorial independence on the subject. He
compared this popular sovereignty to the rights which the Colonies
asserted against England to manage their own affairs, and for the
violation of which the Revolution ensued. The principle had appeared in
most of the bills that he had sponsored or supported. Now it was the
real doctrine. He was like an inventor who, after making many
experiments, hits upon a working device. He was like a philosopher, who
conceives the theory, then clears it, shears away its accidents or even
abandons it. He had long been distrusted in the South. The
Kansas-Nebraska bill still further alienated the South. The South wanted
slavery carried into the territories by the Constitution, even against
the will of the people of the territories. What had Douglas to gain with
popular sovereignty? He really overestimated its appeal. He knew that
the South did not like it, but he believed that it was sound, and that
it would win the majority of the people. He advanced it not only as a
solution of a vexed condition, but in the name of Liberty.

He misconceived the case, and here his tragedy began to flourish. I was
sorry to witness his discomfiture and his first forensic defeat.
Clergymen denounced him; and thinking no doubt that they were the
spokesmen of the back-hall radicalism and ignorant morality which he
despised, he fought them back bitterly: "You who desecrate the pulpit to
the miserable influence of party politics! Is slavery the only wrong in
the country? If so, why not recognize the great principles of
self-government and state equality as curatives?"

He was burned in effigy and branded a