History of Nebraska - Chapter 5



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CHAPTER V
THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE -- THE SECOND COMPROMISE -- STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS -- 
THE RICHARDSON BILL -- THE DODGE BILL -- THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL -- 
PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT -- DIVISION OF NEBRASKA -- ESTIMATE OF DOUGLAS -- 
PROPOSED BOUNDARIES --SUFFRAGE QUALIFICATIONS

   THE first direct contest over the slavery question took place when John 
Taylor of New York, February 17, 1819, moved to amend the bill for the 
territorial organization of Arkansas by the same anti-slavery provision 
which Tallmadge sought to incorporate into the enabling act for the 
admission of Missouri as a state. It provided that no more slaves should 
be introduced into the territory, and that all children born after 
admission should be free, though they might be held to service until the 
age of twenty-five years. But the status of slavery was fixed on the east 
in Mississippi and on the south in Louisiana at the time of the purchase, 
and the argument that Arkansas was naturally and by original right slave 
territory easily prevailed. But the proposal at the same time to admit 
Missouri as a state started the fierce controversy over the slavery 
question, which to leading states-men even then seemed destined to end in 
disruption of the Union, and war, and which were postponed merely by the 
three great compromises -- the last being the Nebraska bill.

   Missouri became the storm center, partially because it was further 
north, and therefore less logically or naturally slave territory than 
Arkansas, and partially because the proposed dedication of the state to 
slavery by constitutional provision would be final.

   The lower house of the First Congress resolved, after thorough debate, 
that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in the states, and 
the North faithfully adhered to, this decision.(1) The prompt and almost 
unanimous passage of the act prohibiting the importation of slaves after 
January 1, 1808, the time when the constitutional limitation would expire, 
seemed to end the slavery question and "the abolition societies which 
existed in all of the states as far south as Virginia died out; it seemed 
as if their occupation was gone."(2)

   There was a growing conviction that slavery was in a decline,(3) and 
Jefferson and Madison proposed and hoped to colonize the slaves of 
Virginia in Sierre Leone. But when the Missouri question came up, the 
cotton gin and the fugitive slave law -- brought forth in the same year -- 
had been at work, gradually changing commercial conditions and moral 
attitudes, for twenty-five years.

   From the time of the invention of the cotton gin till slavery agitation 
culminated in secession in 1860 the production of cotton increased a 
thousand fold. In 1860 its total product was twelve times that of sugar 
and thirty-five times that of rice; and to the raising of cotton it was 
believed that slave labor was indispensable. "Cotton fostered slavery; 
slavery was the cause of the war between the states. That slavery is a 
blessing and cotton is king were associated ideas with which the southern 
mind was imbued before the war. On the floor of the Senate it was declared 
that cotton had vanquished all powers, and that its supremacy could no 
longer be doubted."(4)

   Thus the slavery issue was as selfishly sectional and commercial as the 
tariff issue, which

(1. Annals of Congress, vol. 2, p. 1473.)

(2. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 29.)

(3. Schouler, History of the United States, vol. ii, p. 66.)

(4. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 27.)

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precipitated nullification in 1832 and has kept the country in a state of 
sectional embroilment ever since. Previous to the war political policies 
were controlled by the Northeast and the South. The Northeast was adapted 
to manufacturing, for which slave labor was unfit, and so the Northeast 
eschewed slavery and chose a tariff subsidy instead. The South believed 
that it could only raise the raw material for which slave labor was 
essential, and so refused to pay New England's tariff subsidy, and clung 
to slavery. The same immoral principle in kind was involved in both 
policies, but it differed in degree, and to the disadvantage of the South; 
and on this point the Northwest, holding the balance of power, sided with 
the Northeast, and the South was loser. It was insisted also that the 
growth of slavery was inherently essential to its life and, in turn, 
demanded its territorial expansion. To further this end, in the Missouri 
controversy Clay contended that this spreading policy was philanthropic 
and would mitigate the evils of crowded confinement within the old states, 
and Jefferson, in his anxiety to ameliorate the condition of the slaves, 
since he now despaired of the practicability of abolishing slavery, lent 
his approval to this theory of dilution.(5)

   In 1820 Missouri had a free population of fifty-six thousand and ten 
thousand slaves. In those days at least no odium of being dedicated to 
commercialism attached to New York, for she furnished the leaders in this 
first great anti-slavery battle -- Tallmadge and Taylor in the House and 
Rufus King in the Senate. To illustrate so momentous an event possibly 
Schouler's partial rhetoric is not too highly colored. Referring to 
Tallmadge's advocacy of the restriction amendment to the Missouri enabling 
act, which he had offered, the historian says:

   His torch kindled this great conflagration. A young man of seemingly 
frail health, but of burning eloquence and seemingly deep conviction, his 
national service was limited to a single term . . . for he declined a 
reëlection. His crowded hour here was one of glorious life; he blew one 
loud, shivering blast and then passed out to be heard no more.(6)

   But this panegyric is faulty in its implication that the North was the 
aggressor in the Missouri struggle; and the contrary contention has been 
urged by the highest authority: "In that section (the North) the status of 
slavery had long been regarded as settled. No one supposed for a moment 
that another slave state would ever come into the Union."(7) "The Missouri 
compromise was a southern measure. Its passage was considered at the time 
as in the interests of the South, for it gained immediately a slave state 
in Missouri, and by implication another in Arkansas, while the settlement 
of the northern portion of the territory was looked upon as remote.(8)

   On the other hand, as late as 1836, John Quincy Adams, a stout and 
consistent opponent of the expansion of slavery, in advocating the 
admission of Arkansas as a slave state, quoted the Louisiana treaty, which 
provided that the inhabitants were to be "incorporated in the Union and 
admitted as soon as possible to enjoy all the rights, advantages, and 
immunities of the United States." And he held that, "As congress have not 
the power to abolish slavery in the original states of the Union, they are 
equally destitute of power in those parts of the territories ceded by 
France to the United State's by the name of Louisiana, where slavery 
existed at the time of the acquisition." And Mr. Adams also said that he 
had favored the admission of Missouri on this ground, though he also 
favored the restriction of the Compromise as to the rest of the territory.

   But there is no doubt that the conflict which began over the Missouri 
question was irrepressible, and a few statesmen at least so interpreted 
and feared it. From Jefferson in his retirement at Monticello came the cry 
that it was "the knell of the, Union"; and Clay lamented that "the words 
civil war and disunion are uttered almost without emotion." It was in the 
very nature of things that the North should stand against the aggressive

(5. Writings of Jefferson, vol. 10, p. 158.)

(6. Schouler, History of the United States, vol. iii, p103.)

(7. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. iv, p. 576.)

(8. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 37.)

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expansion spirit of the South; and now that the northern obstructionists 
had outgrown the determined propagators of slavery, outnumbering them in 
the House of Representatives by twenty-nine members, the obstruction was 
the more exasperating. Tallmadge's amendment passed the House by eighty-
seven to seventy-six, notwithstanding the great adverse influence of Clay 
who was then speaker; but it was lost in the Senate, and the bill for the 
time was dead. The bill for admitting Missouri as a slave state was passed 
March 6, 1820. The three points of the Compromise were as follows: (1) The 
Senate should consent to the division of the bill for the admission of 
both Maine and Missouri; (2) the House should yield on the restriction of 
slavery in Missouri; (3) both houses should consent to the admission of 
Missouri with slavery, but forever restrict it from all the Louisiana 
territory north of the parallel 36° 30' -- the extension of the southern 
boundary of Missouri. John Randolph dubbed the fifteen northern members 
who voted against the restriction of slavery in Missouri "dough faces," 
and the epithet stuck to them and their kind till the death of the slavery 
question. Every member of Monroe's cabinet answered yes to his question 
whether Congress had the constitutional power to prohibit slavery in the 
territories. John Quincy Adams thought that this power extended to 
statehood as well, while Crawford, Calhoun, and Wirt thought it was 
limited to the territorial status alone. This difference was portentous of 
trouble to come.

   The constitution offered by Missouri forbade the state legislature to 
interfere with slavery, and required it to pass laws prohibiting free 
colored people from settling in the state. The anti-slavery element in the 
House was of course opposed to these provisions, and it seemed as if the 
whole question would be reopened. But in 1821 Clay succeeded in smoothing 
over the difficulty by a stipulation that the Missouri legislature assent 
to a condition that the exclusion clause of the constitution should never 
be construed to authorize the passage of any law, and that no law should 
ever be passed, by which a citizen of any state should be deprived of any 
privileges and immunities to which he was entitled under the Constitution 
of the United States. The legislature coupled to its assent to this 
fundamental condition the ungracious declaration that it was an invalid 
requirement and not binding upon the state. But the restive territory at 
last came into the Union by the proclamation of the president, August 10, 
1821.

   The second great slavery compromise, took place in 1850, and the 
controversy which it temporarily settled arose directly out of the 
question of territorial organization for New Mexico and Utah. This portion 
of the country had been acquired by the Mexican war and therefore was 
outside of the Louisiana Purchase, and so appertains to our subject only 
as it leads up directly to the Nebraska bill. The first contest over the 
expansion of our territory arose out of the determination of the pro-
slavery element to annex Texas. Webster and Clay, the great Whig leader 
and the Van Buren element of the Democracy were opposed to annexation. Van 
Buren lost renomination for the presidency through his opposition, and 
Clay, alarmed at the power and determination of the South, lost the 
election to Polk by retreating from his positive ground and attempting to 
get on both sides. The annexation of Texas was chiefly due to Calhoun, 
Tyler's secretary of state, and he boldly advocated it on the ground that 
it was necessary to the preservation of slavery.(9) Under Polk the 
Democratic party, for the first time, was in the hands of the Southern 
element and committed to the now aggressive policy of slavery extension, 
and under this policy war with Mexico was deliberately provoked, and the 
annexation of the vast territory between the Louisiana Purchase and the 
Pacific ocean brought about. The great northern leaders opposed this 
acquisition -- or "robbery of realm," as Channing put it. Webster based 
his opposition ostensibly on the general principle of non-expansion. In a 
speech before the Whig state convention at

(9. Cox, Three Decades of Federal Legislation, p. 46.)

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Boston, September 29, 1847, he denounced the war as unnecessary and 
therefore unjustifiable.(10)

   I should deprecate any great extension of our domains . . . I think 
that thus far we have a sort of identity and similarity of character that 
holds us together pretty well . . . I do not know how we can preserve that 
feeling of common country if we extend it to California . . . I say at 
once that the president of the United States shall make out a case that 
the war is not prosecuted for the purpose of acquisition of dominion, for 
no purpose not connected directly with the safety of the union, then they 
(the whig house of representatives) ought not to grant any further 
supplies.(11)

   To what a truly "little American" must such sentiments reduce the "god-
like Webster" in the eyes of the present-day expansionist! But slavery 
extension was firmly in and only to be unhorsed by the shock of war. 
Calhoun boldly brushed aside his assent in Monroe's cabinet to the 
constitutionality and binding force of the restriction of slavery in the 
territories by the Missouri Compromise, which the tell-tale diary of John 
Quincy Adams has disclosed, and insisted that as soon as the treaty with 
Mexico was ratified the sovereignty of Mexico became extinct and that of 
the United States was substituted, "carrying with it the Constitution with 
its overriding control over all the laws and institutions of Mexico 
inconsistent with it."(12) The continuation of slavery in Arkansas and 
Missouri had been defended on Constitutional ground because it existed 
there under Spanish and French law at the time of the cession. By parity 
of reasoning, therefore, slavery should not be extended into the newly 
acquired Mexican territory because it had been formally abolished, 
throughout the Mexican domains by the Mexican government. But with Calhoun 
necessity was a prolific mother of invention.

   Webster in his speech on the admission of Oregon as a free state, 
August 12, 1848, reminded the South that already five slave states had 
been admitted from territory not contemplated when the Constitution was 
formed, and since slave labor and free labor could not exist together the 
inequality would be on the side of the North in northern territory. He 
pointed out, in opposition to Calhoun's sweeping doctrine, that slavery 
rested on purely local law and was against natural law. Under the Roman 
law and the law of all mankind a person was presumed to be free till it 
was proven that he was a slave. But his most important proposition was 
this:

   Congress has full power over the subject. It may establish any such 
government, and any such laws in the territories as in its discretion it 
may see fit. It is subject of course to the rules of justice and 
propriety; but it is under no constitutional restraints.(13)

   Calhoun, who, when the question of the territorial organization of New 
Mexico and Utah arose, had come to be representative of the South, 
demanded equal rights for slavery in the newly acquired territory, actual 
return of fugitive slaves, and that agitation of the slave question should 
cease. The New Mexico and Utah bill was a compromise with the first demand 
in providing that when these territories came to be admitted as states 
they should come in with or without slavery as their constitutions might 
prescribe; yet yielded to the second demand by greatly strengthening the 
fugitive slave law; and as to the third demand -- that was beyond the 
power or reach of any human. agency. The compromise of 1850, then, led the 
way directly to the third and last compromise of the slavery extension 
question -- the Kansas-Nebraska bill. It was a natural, if not an easy 
step, for "squatter sovereignty" from this outside territory where it had 
been enthroned over into the jurisdiction of the Missouri Compromise. The 
alignment of parties, or rather of sections, on the slavery extension 
question at this time is shown by the vote for the admission of California 
as a free state. The ayes were composed of fifteen northern democrats, 
eleven northern whigs, four southern whigs, and Salmon P. Chase, John P. 
Hale, Thomas H. Benton, and Houston of Texas. The nays were all from slave 
states, and all democrats but three. The 

(10. Niles' Register, vol. 73, p. 104.)
(11. Ibid., vol. 73, p. 106.)
(12. Ibid., vol. 74, p. 61.)

(13. Webster's Works, vol. v, p. 311.)

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questions of the compromise were, the organization of the territories of 
New Mexico and Utah without the Wilmot Proviso, that is, without any 
restriction as to slavery, the admission of California as a free state, 
the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, adjustment 
of the Texas boundary dispute, and strengthening of the fugitive slave 
law. There has never been an array of giants in debate in Congress equal 
to those who discussed the compromise of 1850. Among its supporters were 
Webster, Clay, Cass, and Douglas; and among its opponents, Calhoun, 
Seward, Chase, Hale, Benton, and Jefferson Davis. Calhoun's speech in 
opposition was his last in the Senate, and he died before the bill finally 
passed. It was the last struggle also of Clay and Webster. Clay-died in 
1852, two weeks after the Whig convention had set him aside for General 
Scott as the candidate for president, and Webster died four months later 
"the victim of personal disappointment." (14)

   STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS. The slavery question, which had been twice 
compromised with such futility, in 1820 and 1850, was more acute than ever 
in the contest over the Nebraska bill, and was so fitly characterized by 
Seward as the "irrepressible conflict." The death of Webster, Clay, and 
Calhoun left Douglas easily in the ascendency as leader and effective 
debater.

   His blue eyes and dark, abundant hair heightened the physical charm of 
boyishness; his virile movements, his face, heavy-browed, round and 
strong, and his well-formed, extraordinarily large head gave him the 
aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleon trick of attaching 
men to his fortunes. He was a born leader beyond question.(15)

   This commanding physical equipment was completed by his firm, rich, and 
powerful voice. Douglas certainly strongly resembled Napoleon in his 
boldness and brilliancy in giving battle and his wonderful successes; and 
in his tragical personal defeat, which was the concomitant of his 
brilliant victory in Kansas-Nebraska campaign, there is a strong reminder 
of Waterloo. Douglas was the pioneer projector of a territorial 
organization for Nebraska. As early as 1844 he introduced a bill in the 
House of Representatives "to establish the territory of Nebraska," which 
was read twice and referred to the committee on territories from which it 
was not reported.(16) In March 1948 he introduced bill of the same purport 
which was recommitted on his own motion in the following December, and, 
like its predecessor in the House, was pigeonholed by the committee.(17)

   The boundaries of the proposed territory in the bill of 1844 were as 
follows:

   Commencing at the junction of the Kansas with the Missouri river; 
thence following the channel of the Missouri river to its confluence with 
the Qui Court, or Running Water river; thence following up the latter 
river to the 43d degree of north latitude; thence west to the summit of 
the grand chain of the Rocky mountains; thence due south to the 42d degree 
of latitude; thence pursuing the line agreed upon between Spain and the 
United States, February 22, 1819, as the boundary between the territories 
of the two countries, to the 100th degree of longitude west from 
Greenwich; thence following the course of the Arkansas river until it 
intersects the 38th parallel of latitude at a point east of the 98th 
degree of longitude; thence due east on the 38th parallel to the boundary 
line of the state of Missouri; thence north on the said boundary line of 
the state of Missouri to the place of beginning.(18)

   Following are the boundaries of the bill of 1848:

   Commencing at a point in the Missouri river where the 40th parallel of 
north latitude crosses said river; thence following up the main channel of 
said river to the 43d parallel of north latitude; thence west on said 
parallel to the summit of the Rocky mountains; thence due south to the 
40th parallel of north latitude; thence east on said parallel to the place 
of beginning.

   Why Douglas should have projected these measures so much before their 
time, or, to put it another way, why so forceful a member as Douglas 
should have done so little with them has been superficially regarded as 
inex- 

(14. Schouler, History of the United States, vol. v, p. 246.)

(15. Stephen A. Douglas (Brown), Riverside Biographical Series, p. 21.)

(16. Cong. Globe, 2d sess., 28th Cong., p. 41.)
(17. Ibid., 2d sess., 30th Cong., pp. 1, 68.)

(18. These boundaries are from the original bills on file at Washington, 
and never before published.)

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plicable except by the assumption that from the first his motive was to 
further the scheme of the South for the extension of slavery. But 
inspiring the origin and running through the entire long campaign for the 
organization of Nebraska we find the strong and steady purpose of 
commercial enterprise. Chicago, where Douglas lived, was already the 
potential base of northwestern commercial conquest and development. In 
1844 the state of Illinois was already well settled, and the territory of 
Iowa had become important in population as well as promise. The quick eye 
of business interest already saw that the Missouri river would soon be the 
terminus of railway lines leading from Chicago. Whitney had come home from 
Europe in 1844 enthusiastic in the conviction of the need and 
practicability of a railway to the Pacific, and as early as January, 1845, 
he memorialized both houses of Congress in favor of such a project, and 
from that time on the national legislature was bombarded with influences 
in its favor. The representatives in Congress from Illinois and Iowa could 
now see the importance of making the most of this border territory. 
Douglas, as chairman of the committee on territories, was the natural 
agent and spokesman for these interests. He afterward explained his 
seemingly premature action in introducing the organization bill of 1844 by 
saying that he served it on secretary of war as a notice that he must not 
locate any more Indians there, and by repeating this notice he prevented 
action for ten years.(19) He said also that the Atlantic states opposed 
opening Nebraska to settlement out of jealousy, and that both political 
parties had the power to defeat the Kansas-Nebraska hill by making new 
Indian treaties, and "I was afraid of letting that slip."

   In December, 1851, Willard P. Hall, member of the House from Missouri, 
gave notice of a bill for the same purpose,(20) and although Missouri 
statesmen favored the organization of the territory on their western 
border at the earliest time, and Mr. Hall actively supported the 
successful measure in 1854, his own bill seems to have perished by 
neglect. Mr. Hall also introduced a bill for the organization of the 
territory of the Platte on the 13th of December, 1852,(21) but it was 
never reported froth the committee. The introduction of a bill by this 
leading member of the lower house from Missouri so shortly before the 
completion of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and which made no reference to 
slavery or the repeal of the Compromise, illustrates the indifference to 
that question then existing in that state, and also the complete dominance 
in the public mind of

[image caption: STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS]

the name Nebraska, or its French substitute, for the country in question.

   From the time the region of the Platte valley became known to white men 
till it was politically divided by the Kansas-Nebraska act, the name of 
its principal river was applied, roughly speaking, to the country between 
the water-shed of the Platte and Arkansas rivers on the south and the 43d 
parallel on the north, the Missouri river on the east, and the Rocky 
mountains on the west. It was "the Nebraska country." 

(19. Constitutional and Party Questions, J. M. Cutts, pp. 90-92, 
inclusive.)

(20. Cong. Globe, vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 80.)
(21. Ibid., vol. 26, p. 47.)

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   THE RICHARDSON BILL. On February 2, 1853, William A. Richardson, member 
of the House from Illinois, and who, after the death of Douglas in 1861, 
was elected to fill a portion of his unexpired senatorial term, introduced 
house bill No. 353, "to organize the territory of Nebraska."(22) This 
bill, which made no reference to slavery, passed the house February 110, 
1853, by a vote of 98 to 43. The northern boundary of the territory 
described in this bill was the 43d parallel, the present boundary of 
Nebraska on that side, its eastern limit was the west line of Missouri and 
Iowa, its southern, the territory of New Mexico and the parallel of 36 
degrees 30', and its western, the summit of the Rocky mountains.(23) The 
bill underwent an extended and spirited debate which throws an interesting 
light on the condition of the territory and of politics at that time. It 
appears from the debate that the Indian affairs of the territory were 
under the jurisdiction of the superintendent at St. Louis, and that all 
Indians located immediately along the Missouri frontier had been removed 
there from their eastern habitat.(24) Mr. Brooks of New York objected 
strongly to the bill on the ground that the government had no right to 
take possession of the territory because the Indian title to it had not 
been extinguished.(25) In reply to this objection, Mr. Hall of Missouri, 
who was an ardent lieutenant of Douglas and Richardson in their 
enterprise, said that a tract forty miles wide and three hundred miles 
long, running along the border of Missouri, had been set aside for the 
Indians by treaty and was occupied by twelve thousand to fourteen thousand 
of them; a strip of about the same extent, called neutral, was not 
occupied; as to the rest of the territory it was in the same situation as 
that of Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa when they were 
organized. Mr. Hall said that by the act of 1834 all the territory west of 
the Mississippi river, except the states of Missouri and Louisiana and the 
territory of Arkansas, was erected into what was called Indian territory. 
Under the operation of that law our people were not permitted to enter 
that territory at all without a license from the executive of the 
government or his agent. As a result the occupants were limited to about 
five hundred licensed persons, and yet as many as fifty or sixty thousand 
people passed through this country annually on the way to Oregon, 
California, Utah, and New Mexico, under the protection of no law, and 
murders and other crimes were perpetrated. If we desired to protect this 
travel we must organize the territory and extinguish the Indian title. 
When Mr. Brooks insisted that this was the first time that a territorial 
bill had ever been introduced to establish government over territory to 
which the Indian title had not been extinguished in any part and over a 
people who do not exist there, Phelps, Richardson, and Hall held out that 
the Indian title had not been extinguished in any of the territories when 
they were organized. Brooks persisted in his demand to know the population 
of the proposed territory, and Richardson replied that it was not over one 
thousand two hundred.

   Mr. Howe (Pennsylvania) taunted Joshua Giddings on neglecting to insert 
the anti-slavery provision of the Ordinance of 1787 in the bill, and 
wanted to know if it was on account of the national party platforms of 
1852, which had dodged the slavery question. Giddings retorted by reading 
the restriction of the Missouri Compromise and said: "This law stands 
perpetually, and I did not think that this act would receive any increased 
validity by a reenactment . . . It is very clear that the territory 
included in that treaty must be forever free unless the law be repealed."

   When asked by Mr. Howe if he did not remember a compromise since that 
time (1850), Giddings replied that it did not affect this question; and, 
illustrating the then temperate spirit of anti-slavery statesmen, Mr. 
Giddings added, "I am not in the habit of agitating these questions of 
slavery unless drawn into it."(26)

   When Sweetzer (Ohio) moved to strike out 

(22. Cong. Globe, vol. 26, p. 474.)

(23. House Roll, 353.)

(24. Cong. Globe, vol. 26, pp. 442-443.)
(25. Ibid., p. 543.)
(26. Ibid.)

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the part of the bill which provided for the making of treaties with 
Indians to extinguish their title, because it was time "to let the country 
know that it is our policy to plunder these people; not make a mockery 
anew by the pretense of a treaty," Hall protested that while Sweetzer 
might be correct in holding that the Indians should be incorporated as 
citizens, yet a territory large enough for two or three large states 
should not be given up to ten or twelve thousand Indians. He thought a 
portion of the territory had been secured by treaty with the Kansas 
Indians, but that so far there was no controversy between the Indians and 
the government. Mr. Howard said that the treaty of 1825 had given the Ohio 
and Missouri Shawnees fifty miles square, and the Kansas Indians had also 
selected a tract of the same area on the Missouri river under treaty.(27)

   Howard (Texas) said the territory had 340,000 square miles and not over 
six hundred white people, that the bill violated treaties with eighteen 
tribes(28) who had been moved west of the Mississippi river, to whom the 
government had guaranteed that they should never be included in any state 
or territory. Monroe had begun this policy in 1825, and Jackson had 
matured and carried it out under the act of 1830. The Indians, he said, 
would be surrounded by the white men's government, which would force them 
to come under the jurisdiction of white men's laws or suffer their tribal 
organization to be destroyed. There would be no country left for other 
tribes east of the Rocky mountains and west of the Mississippi river. It 
was Great Britain's policy to concede to Indians the right to occupancy 
but not to the fee, while Spain conceded neither.(29) Hall then charged 
Howard with the design of settling the Comanches and other wild tribes of 
Texas in Nebraska territory, which would drive the Overland routes from 
Missouri and Iowa to Texas; and he urged that,

   If in course of time a great railroad should be found necessary from 
this part of the continent to the shore of the Pacific, and the doctrine 
prevails that all the territory west of the Missouri river is to be a 
wilderness from this day, henceforth and forever, Texas being settled, 
this country will have no alternative but to make the Pacific road 
terminate at Galveston or some other point in Texas.

   Mr. Hall insisted that Howard's argument meant that "we should never 
settle Nebraska at all," and that white settlement must be extended to the 
mountains to keep in touch with California and Oregon for the protection 
of the Union and of travel across the plains. He quoted from Medill, the 
late commissioner of Indian affairs, who urged that the Omahas, "Ottoes," 
and "Missourias" be moved so as to be with the Osages and "Kanzas," 
because they were circumscribed in hunting by the Pawnees and Sioux and 
often attacked and murdered by the tribe last named.

   The Pawnees all should be removed north of the Platte, and the Sioux of 
the Missouri restrained from coming south of that river, so that there 
would be a wide and safe passage for our Oregon emigrants and for such of 
those to California as may prefer to take that route, which, I am, 
informed, will probably be the case with many.

   Howard argued that we should negotiate with the Indians before 
violating our treaties with them by organizing a territorial government 
over lands which they occupied. To the objections of Clingman (North 
Carolina) that there were only from six hundred to nine hundred 
inhabitants in the proposed territory, Hall replied that it was because 
the law prevented a white man from settling there, "and if he does a 
company of dragoons will run him out." There would be thirty thousand or 
forty thousand people there within three or four months after there was a 
territorial organization to protect them. The southern line went down to 
36 degrees 30', he explained, because the route from Missouri to New 
Mexico crossed that line, and that travel must be protected:

   Sutherland (New York), imbued with the characteristic spirit of the 
Northeast, and especially of New England, in relation to western 
expansion, argued that it was bad policy to 

(27. Cong. Globe, vol. 26, p. 544.)

(28. Ibid., p. 556, for names of tribes.)
(29. Ibid., p. 558.)

Page 120

take in more lands and encourage emigration from the states which were 
still so largely unoccupied, The eleven landed states, as he called them, 
of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, 
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, and Wisconsin, had 137,000,000 acres of 
unimproved lands in the hands of private owners and 200,000,000 acres of 
public lands. Richardson retorted that this was the argument of Fisher 
Ames over again, and charged the eastern members with fear of opening the 
better lands of the West in competition with their own. He thought the 
best way was to give the people a chance to make their own choice.

   The Senate committee on territories was composed of Douglas, Johnson of 
Arkansas, Jones of Iowa, Houston(30) of Texas, democrats, and Bell and 
Everett, whigs. Douglas dominated the committee. The three members last 
named were opposed to the Nebraska bill. On the 17th of February Douglas 
reported the bill as it came from the House without amendment, and March 
2d he tried to get it up for consideration, and complained that for two 
years the Senate had refused to hear a territorial bill. Rusk of Texas 
bitterly opposed the bill, and said that its passage would "drive the 
Indians back on us," and it failed of consideration by a vote of twenty to 
twenty-five, all but five of those opposed including two from Delaware -- 
being of the South. Of the southern senators, only the two from Missouri 
favored the bill.(31)

   Senator Atchison's remarks on the 3d of March are notable as a 
remarkable contribution to the theory of the inviolability of the Missouri 
Compromise, and also as being the only serious reference in the whole 
debate to the slavery question. In the early part of the session he had 
seen two objections to the bill, namely, the fact that the title of the 
Indians had not been extinguished and the Missouri Compromise. It was very 
clear to him that the law of Congress passed when Missouri was admitted 
into the Union, excluding slavery from the territory of Louisiana north on 
36o 30', would be enforced in that territory unless it was specially 
rescinded, and, whether constitutional or not, would do its work, and that 
work would preclude slaveholders from going into that territory. But when 
he came to look into the question he saw no prospect of the repeal of the 
Missouri Compromise. But for this he would oppose organization of the 
territory unless his constituency and all people of the South could go 
into it carrying their slaves with them. But he had no hope that the 
restriction would ever be repealed. The first great error in the political 
history of the country was the Ordinance of 1787 making the Northwest 
territory free; the second was the Missouri Compromise. He did not like 
the competition in agriculture with his own state which would follow the 
organization of the territory, but population would go into every 
habitable part of the territory, in a very few years in defiance of the 
government, so it might as well be let in now.(32)

   Houston made a flamboyant speech against the bill, entirely devoted to 
the wrongs of the Indians which its passage would involve, and Bell 
(Tennessee) spoke along the same-line, and urged that there was no 
necessity for territorial organization.33 Douglas closed the debate 
showing that the provisions of the bill did not include the land of any 
Indian tribe without their consent (it had been so amended in the House), 
and he said, "It is an act very dear to my heart." He had presented a bill 
eight years before in the House and had been pressing it ever since. But 
on the 3d of March the motion to take up the bill was laid on the table by 
a vote of twenty-three to seventeen, and it was never revived in that form.

   The debate, especially that of the House, discloses that the border 
states north and south were fighting for advantage in the traffic to the 
Pacific coast and in the location of the then somewhat dimly prospective 
Pacific railway. This real objection to the measure on the part of the 
southern states seems to have been largely veiled by an ostensibly very 
philanthropic regard for the fate of the Indian: 

(30. General Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto.)

(31. Cong. Globe, vol. 26, p. 1020.)
(32. Ibid., p. 1113.)
(33. Ibid., p. 1115.)

Page 121

but it seems scarcely possible that finesse could have been so adroitly 
spun and spread so far as to have concealed the consideration of the 
admission of more free territory as the real objection on the part of the 
South. On the other hand, the prompt report which Douglas made from his 
committee early in the next session of Congress, recommending the squatter 
sovereignty compromise, indicates that he had discovered not only that the 
South, in part at least, had decided to press the slavery objection, but 
the way to meet it -- unless indeed this compromise was a gratuitous sop 
thrown to the South as a bid for its favor to his political fortunes. In a 
speech at Atchison during the vacation, September 24, 1854, Senator 
Atchison, in a bibulous burst of confidence, said that he had forced 
Douglas to change his tactics and adopt the compromise.(34) While this 
claim shames the wily senator's frank disclaimer at the last session, 
alluded to above, it is entirely consistent with his leadership in the 
subsequent attempt to make the most of the compromise by forcing Kansas 
into the Union as a slave state.

   At a meeting, in Platte county, Missouri, Atchison spoke in the same 
vein. The sentiment and determination of the western border Missourians 
whom he represented were expressed in the following declaration: 
"Resolved, that if the territory shall be opened to settlement we pledge 
ourselves to each other to extend the institutions of Missouri over the 
territory, at whatever cost of blood or treasure." There was a very large 
slave population in these border counties, amounting, it is said to as 
many as seventeen thousand, and the fears freely expressed by Atchison and 
others that this property, and so the system under which it was held, 
would be seriously menaced if the immediately adjoining territory of 
Kansas should be made free, were no doubt well founded. And yet solicitude 
about this matter seems to have been confined to a few, and there is 
evidence that indifference was the rule rather than the exception. This is 
illustrated by the fact that the members of the House of Representatives 
from Missouri left it to the members of Congress of Iowa to insist on the 
division of the territory.

   The sweeping dictum that "Douglas was a man of too much independence to 
suffer the dictation of Atchison, Toombs, or Stephens,"(35) is rather 
beside the question, and it seems to be virtually contradicted by its 
author when he shows how readily Douglas yielded to the radical and 
momentous amendment of Dixon, a lesser man than either of the three above 
named, for the total repeal of the Missouri restriction, when Douglas 
spoke "in an earnest and touching manner," so that "it was a pretty 
comedy. The words of Douglas were those of a self-denying patriot, and not 
those of a man who was sacrificing the peace of his country, and, as it 
turned out, the success of his party, to his own personal ambition."

   Early in the session of the next Congress, December 14, 1853, Senator 
Dodge of Iowa, apparently acting in concert with the committee on 
territories of which Douglas was chairman, introduced a bill to organize 
the territory of Nebraska which should comprise "all that part of the 
territory of the United States included between the summit of the Rocky 
mountains on the west, the states of Missouri and Iowa on the east, the 
43o 30' of north latitude on the north, and the territory of New Mexico 
and the parallel of 36o 30' north latitude on the south."(36) This bill 
contained no reference to slavery. "The simple bill which Dodge introduced 
has undergone very important changes," said Chase, in asking for more time 
to consider the committee's substitute.(37)

   THE DODGE BILL. On the 4th of January following, the committee on 
territories, through Douglas, reported the bill of Dodge in the form of a 
substitute, in which the proposed territory embraced all of the Louisiana 
Purchase lying north of latitude 36o 30', except the states of Iowa and 
Missouri and that part of the territory of Minnesota which lay between the 
Mississippi river on the east and the northern boundary of Iowa and the 
Missouri and 

(34. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 431.)
(35. Ibid., p. 432.)

(36. Senate bill No. 22, 1853.)

(37. Cong. Globe, vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 239.)

Page 122

White Earth rivers on the south and west and Fort Leavenworth, then a 
military station, was designated as the capital.(38) A leading historian 
commits the error of including within this proposed territory of Nebraska 
the area now comprised in the states of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, 
Montana, and, part of Colorado and Wyoming, which "contained 485,000 
square miles, a territory larger by thirty-three thousand square miles 
than all the free states in the Union east of the Rocky mountains."(39) 
That larger part of the Dakotas lying east of the Missouri, however, 
belonged to Minnesota, and a corner of Wyoming was not included in the 
purchase. But the area in square miles as given is approximately correct.

   The committee's bill contained the compromise provision of the Utah and 
New Mexico bills, that the territory of Nebraska or any portion of the 
same when admitted as a state or states "shall be received into the Union 
with or without slavery as their constitution may prescribe at the time of 
their admission" Accompanying this bill was a formal report in which 
Douglas explained why the provisions relating to slavery were inserted. He 
points out that "eminent statesmen hold that Congress is invested with no 
rightful authority to legislate upon the subject of slavery in the 
territories, and that therefore the eighth section of the Missouri 
Compromise is null and void"; while "the prevailing sentiment in large 
sections of the Union sustains the doctrine that the Constitution of the 
United States secures to every citizen an inalienable right to move into 
any of the territories with his property of whatever kind and description 
and to hold and enjoy the same under the sanction of law . . . Under this 
section, as in the case of the Mexican law in New Mexico and Utah, it is a 
disputed point whether slavery is prohibited in the new country by valid 
enactment. As Congress deemed it wise and prudent to refrain from deciding 
the matters in controversy then (1850), either affirming or repealing the 
Mexican laws or an act declaratory of the true intent of the constitution 
and the extent of the protection afforded by it to slave property in the 
territories, your committee are not prepared now to recommend a departure 
from the course pursued on that memorable occasion either by affirming or 
repealing the eighth section the Missouri act, or by any act declaratory 
of the meaning of the constitution in respect to the legal points in 
dispute."(40)

   After the bill was reported it was amended by the addition of the 
concluding of the part committee's report, which was declaratory of the 
meaning of the compromise of 1850, as follows:

   First. -- That all questions pertaining to slavery in the territories 
and the new states to be formed therefrom, are to be left to decision of 
the people residing therein, their appropriate representatives, to be 
chosen by them for that purpose.
   Second --That "all cases involving title to slaves" and "questions of 
personal freedom" are to be referred to the jurisdiction of the local 
tribunals, with the right of appeal to the supreme court of the United 
Staes [sic].
   Third-That the provision of the constitution of the United States in 
respect to fugitives from service is to be carried into faithful execution 
in all "the organized territories" the same as in the states.

   On the 16th day of January Dixon of Kentucky fortified the indirect 
setting aside of the Missouri Compromise by the popular sovereignty 
provision of the bill by moving an amendment explicitly repealing the anti-
slavery clause of the compromise. If it is true that "the Senate was 
astonished and Douglas was startled"(41) their emotions must have been due 
to being brought face to face with the spectacular plainness of the 
meaning of the indirect repeal already incorporated in the bill. The 
popular sovereignty clause of the Nebraska bill was absolutely 
inconsistent with the Missouri restriction and applied to all the 

(38. Cong. Globe, vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 222.)

(39. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 426. There are also 
two material errors in the description of the boundaries of the 
territories of Nebraska and Kansas in p. 222, pt. 1, vol. 28, Cong. Globe. 
The boundaries given in the bills here referred to have been obtained by 
examination of the bills on file in the capitol at Washington, as none of 
them, excepting the last one, which passed, were officially published.)

(40. Senate reports, 1st sess., 33d Cong., no. 15.)

(41. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, P. 433.)

Page 123

territory affected by it except the part of the Dakotas lying east of the 
Missouri river, and which would be hopelessly anti-slavery under the 
popular choice. Moreover, this very area had been embraced in the 
territory of Wisconsin by the act of 1836, in which was incorporated the 
slavery interdiction of the Ordinance of 1787; and this interdiction seems 
to have been passed on when the territory fell to Minnesota in 1849, where 
it remained when the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-
Nebraska act. It seems still less accurate, or still more misleading, in 
the attempt to exaggerate the importance of the formal repeal of the 
Missouri Compromise, to say, touching Douglas's 4th of January bill, that,

   "The South was insulted by the pretense of legalizing slavery in 
territory already by the Missouri Compromise preëmpted for freedom";(42) 
for the report of Douglas "closed with a proposition which certainly set 
it (the compromise) aside";(43) and this very proposition was appended to 
the 4th of January bill.

   Nor is the ground for the statement that, "So long as the Missouri 
Compromise remained the law of the land slavery could have no legal 
recognition in Nebraska while it was yet a territory" discoverable; for 
the 4th of January bill provided, as we have seen, "That all questions 
pertaining to slavery in the territories . . . are to be left to the 
decision of the people residing therein." Eastern writers seem to have 
conceived it to be an a priori virtue to be offended at the virile 
strenuosity of this remarkable western leader and they seem to write under 
the compulsion of arriving at the conclusion that "in the view of Douglas 
moral ideas had no place in politics."(44) For the great part which Clay 
played the compromise of 1850 there is a palliation here there is not 
praise, and we are told that it is probable that "the matured historical 
view will be that Webster's position as to the application of the Wilmot 
Proviso was statesmanship of the highest order." Though Clay, like 
Webster, was a constant candidate for the presidency and bore a potent 
part in the two great compromises with slavery aggression, which were 
bitterly assailed by anti-slavery sentiment, he is awarded the meed of 
patriotic motive and achievement, while the similar action of Douglas is 
written down as a mere "bid for southern support in the next democratic 
convention."(45) By a sort of pneumatic method he is summarily rejected 
from the company of respectable statesmen, or politicians even, with the 
brand of "Stephen Arnold Douglas --with accent on that second name."(46)

   This last is a good example of the overworking of a bias, a 
predilection, or a tortured emotion which one almost expects of the 
author. Another historian is fairer in describing the great 3d of March 
speech:

   The appearance of Douglas was striking, Though very-short in stature, 
he had an enormous head, and when he arose to take arms against a sea of 
troubles which opposed him, he was the very picture of intellectual force. 
Always a splended fighter, he seemed this night like a gladiator who 
contended against great odds; for while he was backed by thirty-seven 
senators, among his opponents were the ablest men of the senate and their 
arguments must be answered if he expected to ride out the storm which had 
been raised against him. Never in the United States, in the arena of 
debates had a bad cause been more splendidly advocated; never more 
effectively was the worse made to appear the better reason.(47)

   KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL. These estimates of the author of Nebraska's 
political beginning by standard historians of today, seem pertinent here 
as affording the latest and thus far the best view of his character and of 
his motives in the prologue to the great national tragedy which followed 
the Nebraska contest. But they also indicate that a remove of a single 
generation from the culminating scenes of the struggle over slavery does 
not serve entirely to separate the northern writer from northern prejudice 
and partisanship. The serious charge against Douglas is that he initiated 
the 

(42. Macy, Political Parties in the United States, p. 189.)

(43. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 428.)
(44. Ibid., Vol. i, p. 431.)
(45. Ibid., p. 430.)

(46. Schouler, History of the United States, vol. v, p. 285.)

(47. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 471.)

Page 124

Nebraska bill, which grew into the. Kansas-Nebraska act, including the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, of his own volition, and, by so doing, 
to ingratiate himself with the South for the selfish furtherance of his 
presidential ambition, he deliberately disturbed the repose which had been 
established by the compromise of 1850, and which President Pierce had 
promised in his late message should "suffer no shock during my official 
term, if I have power to prevent it." There is much reason for believing 
that Douglas was aware that southern politicians would press for adherence 
to the principles of the latest compromise, and that, instead of accepting 
it in the way of a compromise, as Clay or Webser would have done, at an 
earlier time, by his imperious method he took the

[image caption: Engraving from a photograph owned by the Nebraska State 
Historical Society. WILLIAM WALKER AT THE AGE OF 33. Provisional governor 
of the proposed territory of Nebraska, 1853]

lead and pressed what he saw was a necessary concession as a positive 
measure of his own. Moreover, the debate shows that the question whether 
Douglas acted in bad faith in reference to the Missorui Compromise at 
least remained an open one, and with the technical or formal advantage 
with Douglas. In his speech in the Senate, February 29, 1860 he said:

   It was the defeat in the House of Representatives of the enactment of 
the bill to extend the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific ocean, after it 
had passed the Senate on my own, motion, that opened the controversy of 
1850 which was terminated by the adoption of I measures of that year . . . 
Both parties in 1852 pledged themselves to abide by that principle, and 
thus stood pledged not to

Page 125

prohibit slavery in the territories. The whig party affirmed that pledge 
and so did the democracy. In 1854 we only carried out, in the Kansas-
Nebraska act, the same principle that had been affirmed in the compromise 
measures of 1850. I repeat that their resistence to carrying out in good 
faith the settlement of 1820, their defeat of the bill for extending it to 
the Pacific ocean, was the sole cause of the agitation of 1850, and gave 
rise to the necessity of establishing the principle of non-intervention by 
congress with slavery in the territories.

   And in his famous speech of March 3, 1854, he silenced Chase and Seward 
on his point by showing that, after the Missouri compact of 1820 was made, 
the northern vote in Congress still kept that state out of the Union and 
forced Mr. Clay's new conditions of 1821; that a like northern vote was 
recorded against admitting Arkansas with slavery in 1836, and that the 
legislature of Mr. Seward's state (New York), after the Missouri act of 
1820, had instructed her members of Congress to vote against the admission 
of any territory as a state with sIavery.

   Mr. Douglas at least went far toward establishing the consistency of 
his action in 1854 by quoting from his speech in Chicago in 1850: "These 
measures (of 1850) are predicated on the great fundamental principle that 
every people ought to possess the right of regulating their own internal 
concerns and domestic institutions in their own way."

   It was conceded on both sides. that the states had the absolute power 
to adopt or reject slavery by provisions in their constitutions, and, as 
Douglas points out, it was inconsistent deny this principle to the 
territories: "These things are all confided by the constitution to each 
state to decide for itself, and I know of no reason why the same principle 
should not be confided to the territories."

   A severe critic of Douglas's selfish subserviency in the Nebraska 
affair admits that,

   Probably he had at first no more intention of actually enlarging the 
arena of slavery than had Daniel Webster in laboring to remove the 
restriction from the territory of Utah. Northern free labor was moving 
westward, as he knew, by leaps and bounds. It was not likely that slavery 
would ever gain any foot hold in the region between the Rocky mountains 
and the states of Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri. Douglas no doubt sought to 
further his presidential prospects without making any actual change in the 
practical situation respecting slavery extension.

   But what more or less could be said of Clay, Webster, or Lincoln, each 
of whom, while as ardently seeking to further his presidential prospects, 
temporized upon the slavery question? And in view of the probability, con-

[image caption: ABELARD GUTHRIE. Delegate to Congress representing the 
proposed territory of Nebraska, 1853]

firmed by the result, that slavery could not be forced upon Kansas or 
Nebraska, whatever might be done with the Missouri restriction, did not 
the course of Douglas result in a distinct gain in that, "the southerners 
abandoned the claim to their inherent right to take their slaves into the 
new territories and united both whigs and democrats -- in support of 
Douglas's bill"?

   Furthermore, Douglas emphasized the fact that there was a grave 
question as to the constitutionality of the Missouri restriction; and may 
he not be credited with sagacity and patri-

Page 126

otism in fortifying against the event of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, 
which confirmed his fears, by interposing his Kansas-Nebraska popular 
sovereignty device as a new bar to the door against slavery in the 
territories which that memorable decision had otherwise opened wide? For 
"Kansas was the only territory in which slaveholders tried to assert their 
rights" -- that is, the constitutional right to carry slaves into the 
territories against attempted prohibition by Congress or its creatures, 
the territorial legislatures. And as it turned out, they had the best of 
the argument, and nothing could have hindered their design but the popular 
sovereignty provision of the Nebraska bill.

   But this spontaneous harshness toward Douglas reaches the climax of its 
unreasonableness when it discovers in southern proslavery motives a rare 
nicety or moral discrimination and self renunciation, and exalts it to 
contrasting heights above the groveling motives of Douglas. Thus we are 
told that the bill that passed the House in 1853, "being naturally 
objectionable to the pro-slavery politicians who still respected the 
Missouri Compromise, was defeated by them in the Senate." But in this bill 
there was no allusion to slavery, and the Compromise was not attacked. 
Moreover, on the final passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which repealed 
the Compromise, only nine votes from the South --two democrats and seven 
whigs -- could be mustered against it in the House, while forty-two 
democrats and forty-five whigs from the North voted against it.(48) But in 
one instance Douglas has been grouped with the patriots -- though perhaps 
inadvertently. For "the ardent advocates of the compromise of 1850 were 
all devoted to the Union";(49) and Douglas advocated every part of the 
compromise.

   The impartial judge of contemporary circumstances will conclude that 
Douglas thought and had good ground for thinking that in this first 
organization of new territory since the new compromise or temporizing 
arrangement between the slavery and the anti-slavery element in 1850, 
another controversy was inevitable, and that the statement that the "new 
policy thus sprung so unexpectedly upon the country was the secret 
contrivance of a few aspiring democrats, obsequious to slavery's 
propaganda,"(50) is an inadequate and inconsistent explanation of the new 
compromise. Dixon's reason for pressing the repeal of the Missouri 
restriction, which it is generally admitted took Douglas by surprise, 
illustrates the fact that the pro-slavery leaders of the South intended to 
fight for a new arrangement, and the solid support which the members from 
the South gave to the bill makes the contention that the scheme was 
originated by a few politicians and that the people of the South "had not 
dreamed of taking it" little less than ridiculous. Mr. Dixon stated that 
he never did believe in the propriety of passing the Missouri Compromise. 
"I never thought the great senator from Kentucky, Mr. Clay, when he 
advocated that measure did so because his judgment approved it. . . And I 
have never thought that that measure received the sanction of his heart or 
of his head." He said that he proposed the amendment under the firm 
conviction that he was carrying out the principles settled in the 
compromise of 1850, and which left the whole question of slavery with the 
people and without any congressional interference. He had always believed 
that Congress had no authority over the subject of slavery in states or 
territories, and, therefore, that the Missouri Compromise was 
unconstitutional. In a colloquy with Dixon, Douglas explained that he "and 
some others with whom he consulted" thought that Dixon's amendment not 
only wiped out the legislation excluding slavery but affirmatively 
legislated slavery into the territory; he therefore inserted the repealing 
clause in his own words to avoid the affirmative force of Dixon's 
amendment. Abelard Guthrie, who had been elected a delegate to Congress 
from Nebraska, at Wyandotte, in October, 1852, writing while on his way to 
Washington in December 1852, to William

(48. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 489.)

(49. Macy, Political Parties in the United States, p. 129.)

(50. Schouler, History of the United States, vol. v, p. 281.)

Page 127

Walker, provisional governor, throws light on the attitude of the pro-
slavery element toward territorial organization, as follows:

   I traveled in company with Senators Guyer and Atchison of Missouri and 
Representatives Richardson and Bissil of Illinois. I am sorry to say our 
Missouri senators are by no means favorable to our territorial projects. 
The slavery question is the cause of this opposition. I regret that it 
should interfere -- it ought not. Mr. Atchison thinks the slaves in 
Nebraska are already free by the operation of the Missouri Compromise act, 
and asks a repeal of that act before anything shall be done for Nebraska.

  In a letter to the New York Tribune, written August 9, 1856, Mr. Guthrie 
relates that he was a candidate for reëlection as a delegate to Congress 
in 1853; but because "the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was now first 
agitated, and it was thought important to success that the territory 
should be represented by one favorable to that measure," Mr. Guthrie 
complains, the influence of the administration was thrown against him, and 
he was defeated by a large Indian vote.

  The tradition and belief of the Douglas family are worthy of 
consideration. A son of Senator Douglas thinks that his father had become 
convinced that the South could and would repeal the Missouri Compromise, 
and he therefore set about to get the best terms he could against the 
further spread of slavery, and believed he had accomplished this in the 
formal recognition of the doctrine of popular sovereignty in lieu of the 
open door which the South was bent on securing.

  PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT. On the 23d day of January, 1854, Douglas 
presented the Kansas-Nebraska bill which passed as a substitute for the 
Nebraska bill of January 4th. It comprised two important additions to the 
old bill, which were to divide the territory into two -- Kansas and 
Nebraska -- and specifically repeal the Missouri Compromise. His own 
reasons for dividing the territory are as follows:

   There are two delegates here who have been elected by the people of 
that territory. They are not legal delegates, of course, but they have 
been sent here as agents. They have petitioned us to make two territories 
instead of one, dividing them by the 40th parallel of north latitude -- 
the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Upon consulting with the delegates 
from Iowa I found that they think that their local interests as well as 
the interests of the territory, require that the proposed territory of 
Nebraska should be divided into two territories, and the people ought to 
have two delegates. So far as I have been able to consult with the 
Missouri delegates they are of the same opinion. The committee therefore 
have concluded to recommend the division of the territory into two 
territories, and also to change the boundary in the manner I have 
described.(51)

[image caption: Engraving from a photograph owned by the Nebraska State 
Historical Society. HADLEY D. JOHNSON. First "delegate to Congress" from 
the unorganized territory, now known as the state of Nebraska. Elected 
October 11, 1853.]

  The change consisted in making the southern line 37 degrees instead of 
36 degrees 30', thus avoiding division of the Cherokee country and running 
between that and the Osages.

  The simple reasons Douglas himself gave for finally and somewhat 
suddenly dividing the Nebraska territory as at first proposed, into two 
territories, are not only consistent 

(51. Cong. Globe, vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 221.)

Page 128

with the circumstances but are fairly confirmed by them, and they leave no 
necessity for the search that has been made for hidden, mysterious, and 
unworthy motives. The two delegates to whom Douglas referred, as he is 
quoted above, were Mr. Hadley D. Johnson, who was chosen at an election 
held at Bellevue, October 11, 1853, and the Rev. Thomas Johnson, who was 
elected at Wyandotte on the same day. Mr. Hadley D. Johnson states that 
after consultation with citizens it was decided to advocate the 
organization of two territories instead of one, and that on his 
presentation of the case to Douglas he adopted Johnson's plan and changed 
the bill so as to divide Nebraska into Kansas and Nebraska. It was quite 
natural that the people of the northern part of the territory and of Iowa 
lying directly opposite, should desire the division so as to have complete 
control, in view of the contemplated Pacific railway, and for other 
commercial reasons, and Mr. Johnson states that Senator Dodge of lowa 
warmly approved his plan for two territories, and took pains to introduce 
him to Douglas. Just as naturally, too, the people and politicians of 
Missouri would prefer to have the territory opposite their state, and over 
whose affairs they would naturally exercise much control separated from 
the northern territory. The general commercial interests, as well as 
considerations of the slavery question, would lead them to this desire.

   Contemporaries of Hadley D. Johnson now living, as well as the 
important part he played in the affairs of Iowa and Nebraska, testify to 
his high standing and the credibility his statements deserve. He was 
elected a member of the Iowa senate for the Council Bluffs district in 
1852, was a "provisional" delegate to Congress from Nebraska in 1853, was 
a prominent candidate for delegate to Congress at the election of 1854, 
was elected territorial printer by the legislature of Nebraska in 1856, 
and in general was recognized as a man of affairs in those earlier years.

   We have an account of a meeting of citizens of Mills county, Iowa, at 
Glenwood, in October, 1853. Glenwood was then the county seat of Mills 
county, which adjoins Pottawattomie, of which Council Bluffs is the county 
seat, on the south, and borders on the Missouri river on the west, 
opposite Sarpy county, Nebraska, in which Bellevue is situated. Among 
those who addressed this "great and enthusiastic meeting were Hadley D. 
Johnson, delegate elect from Nebraska," J. L Sharp, who was chairman of 
the committee on resolutions, M. H. Clark who had bee chosen provisional 
secretary of Nebraska at the same Bellevue election which chose Johnson 
for delegate, and Hiram P. Bennet. Mr. Sharp became president of the first 
legislative council of Nebraska, and Bennet and Clark were also members of 
that body.

   The resolutions adopted by the meeting declared that the best interests 
of western Iowa as well as the bordering Indian tribes would be secured by 
the early organization of the territory of Nebraska, and that "the 
boundaries indicated by Judge Douglas's bill, subserve the interests of 
the whole country; but if they can not be obtained we would next prefer 
the parallel of 39 1/2 degrees south and 44 degrees north as the 
boundaries of Nebraska." This reference to the bill of Douglas "introduced 
some years ago," which must have meant his bill of 1848, discloses that 
the boundary which in the opinion of these enterprising border promoters 
would "best subserve the interests of the whole country" extended half a 
degree further south than the line that would satisfy them -- to the 
fortieth parallel, -- and fell one degree short of the boundary they 
proposed on the north. There is no material difference in the two 
boundaries in question, and perhaps the Glenwood resolutions made a 
mistake in their reference to Douglas's bill; but in any event they show 
that the men of Iowa wanted a territory, as nearly and exclusively as they 
could get it, opposite their own state. The proprietary regard of these 
Iowans for the prospective territory, the key to it, and their resolute 
intent to bring about territorial organization in the form suited to their 
ambitious purposes are disclosed in the other resolutions of the meeting. 
While they "approve of an election by the citizens of Nebraska of 
provisional ter-

Page 129

ritorial officers as well as a delegate to represent their interests in 
the approaching Congress," they "would not approve any measure which would 
retard or interfere with the early extinction of the Indian titles to all 
of said territory." They request their senators and representatives in 
Congress to use their best efforts to carry out the policy set forth in 
the resolutions, direct a copy to be sent to each of them and to Senator 
Douglas, recommend the appointment of a committee to confer with citizens 
of other counties touching the interests of western Iowa, and ask the St. 
Mary's Gazette, Western Bugle, Chicago Democratic Press, Peoria Press, and 
New York Herald to publish the proceedings of the meeting. Nor did they 
neglect the one subject on which all wide-awake border people in this 
latitude were now always harping, so they resolved, "That the valley of 
the Nebraska or Platte river and the South Pass is the route most clearly 
pointed out by the hand of nature for a world's thoroughfare, and a 
natural roadway for the United States, connecting the Atlantic with the 
Pacific."

   Mr. Hadley D. Johnson states(52) that in the month of November meetings 
were held at Council Bluffs which were addressed by Senator A. C. Dodge 
and Col. S. R. Curtis, one of the first United States Commisioners of the 
Union Pacific railway, "who warmly advocated the construction of our 
contemplated railways, and the organization of Nebraska territory." He 
further says:

   Before starting (for Washington) a number of our citizens who took a 
deep interest in the organization of a territory west of Iowa had on due 
thought and consultation agreed upon a plan which I had formed, which was 
the organization of two territories instead of one as had heretofore been 
contemplated.

   After arriving at Washington Mr. Johnson says:

   Hon. A. C. Dodge,(53) senator from Iowa, who had from the first been an 
ardent friend of my plan, introduced me to Judge Douglas, to whom I 
unfolded my plan and asked him to adopt it, which, after mature 
consideration, he decided to do, and he agreed that he would report a 
substitute for the pending bill, which he afterwards did do . . . The 
Honorable Bernhart Henn, member of the house from Iowa, who was also my 
friend, warmly advocated our territorial scheme.

   The important part which Senator Dodge played in the great national 
drama -- or perhaps a prologue which was to be followed by the tragedy of 
the Civil war -- aids greatly in the interpretation of its motive and 
meaning. Many of us of Nebraska remember him as the suave, kindly, and 
gracious gentleman of the old school. By virtue of his ability and 
experience as statesman and politician, as well as his official position, 
Senator Dodge represented the interests and wishes of the anti-slavery 
state of Iowa,. which demanded the early organization of the great empire 
on its western border.

   Indeed, until the last, when the question of the adjustment of the 
interests or demands of slavery became paramount, Senator Dodge might well 
have been regarded as the leader in the project of territorial 
organization rather than Douglas himself. In the terrific but short 
struggle at the last, when slavery was pressing its over-reaching and self-
destructive demand, he preserved his independence. His democratic, anti-
slave holding spirit breaks out in his rebuke of Senator Brown of 
Mississippi in the course of the Kansas-Nebraska debate. Brown had 
defended negro slavery on the ground that it was necessary to the 
performance of menial labor which he referred to contemptuously as beneath 
white people:

   There are certain menial employments which belong exclusively to the 
negro. Why sir, it would take you longer to find a white man in my state 
who would hire himself out as a boot-black or a white woman who would go 
to service as a chamber-maid than it took Captain Cook to sail around the 
world. Would any man take his boot-black, would any lady take her chamber-
maid into companionship?

   This spirited retort of Senator Dodge's is not that of a dough-face:

   Sir, I tell the senator from Mississippi, -- I speak it upon the floor 
of the American sen- 

(52. Trans. Neb. State Hist. Soc., vol. ii, p. 87, et seq.)

(53. Augustus C. Dodge, born January 2, 1812; died November 20, 1883.)

Page 130

ate, in presence of my father [Henry Dodge of Wisconsin] who will attest 
its truth -- that I have performed and do perform when at home, all of 
those menial services to which that senator referred in terms so grating 
to my feelings. As a general thing I saw my own wood, do all my own 
marketing. I never had a servant of any color to wait upon me a day in my 
life. I have driven teams, horses, mules and oxen, and considered myself 
as respectable then as I do now, or as any senator upon this floor is.(54)

   This incident serves also to illustrate the great change in customs and 
manners which has taken place in the short time since the birth of our 
commonwealth. This Cincinnatus -- foreman of the founders of Nebraska -- 
was yet of courtly manners, a senator of the United States, and minister 
to the court of Spain.

   When, at last, the Kansas-Nebraska bill involved a question of vital 
importance to the Democratic party, Douglas, as the conceded and imperious 
leader of the party, overshadowed all others. But from first to last Dodge 
coöperated with Douglas for the organization of Nebraska. He showed that 
he consistently supported the popular sovereignty principle of the 
Nebraska measure by showing that he had advocated that principle as a 
solution of the still vexed slavery question in his support of the 
compromise measures of 1850.(55)

   Senator Dodge discloses Clearly his reasons for desiring the division 
of the territory:

   Originally I favored the organization of one territory; but 
representations from our constituents, and a more critical examination of 
the subject --having an eye to the systems of internal improvement which 
must be applied by the people of Nebraska and Kansas to develop their 
resources -- satisfied my colleague who was a member of the committee that 
reported this bill, and myself, that the great interests of the whole 
country, and especially of my state demanded that we should support the 
proposition for the establishment of two territories. Otherwise the seat 
of government and leading thoroughfares must have fallen south of Iowa.(56)

   Though Bernhart Henn,(57) member of the lower house of Congress, lived 
at Fairfield, as early as June 11, 1853, he had established a land and 
warrant broker's office under the firm name of Henn, Williams & Co., at 
Council Bluffs, the residence or rendezvous of the potent promoters of the 
territorial organization and of Omaha City.

   In a speech in the House, urging the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska 
bill, he discloses the objects and motives of the promoters even more 
clearly than Senator Dodge had done. "The bill is of more practical 
importance to the state of Iowa, and the people of the district I 
represent than to any other state or constituency in the union."(58)

   In answer to "the unjust charge made on this floor by several that it 
was the scheme of southern men, whereby one of the states to be formed out 
of these territories was to be a slave state" he demands: "Do they not 
know that the delegates sent here by the people interested in the 
organization of that country proposed this division?"(59)

   Continuing in the same strain he urges that the 40th parallel, the 
proposed line of division, is nearly on a line dividing the waters of the 
Platte and the Kansas rivers:

   A line which nature has run for the boundary of states; a line that 
will insure to each territory a common interest, each having a rich and 
fertile valley for its commercial center; a line that will be of immense 
importance to the prosperity and commerce of Iowa; a line that will make 
the commercial and political center of Nebraska on a parallel with the 
great commercial emporiums of the Atlantic and the harbor of San Francisco 
. . .
The organization of two territories instead of one has advantages for the 
north, and for Iowa in particular, which should not be overlooked. It 
secures in the Platte valley one of the lines of Pacific railways by 
making it the center of commerce, wealth and trade. It brings to the 
country bordering on Iowa the seat of government for Nebraska. It at once 
opens up a home market for our produce. It places west of us a dense and 
thriving settlement. It gives to western Iowa a prominence far ahead of 
that which ten years ago was maintained by the towns in the eastern por- 

(54. Appendix Cong. Globe, vol. 29, p. 376.)
(55. Ibid. p. 380.)

(56. Appendix Cong. Globe, vol. 29, p. 382.)

(57. Bernhart Henn, elected to Congress in 1849, serving four years.)

(58. Appendix Cong. Globe, vol. 29, p. 885.)
(59. Ibid., p. 886.)

Page 131

tion of our state. It brings Iowa nearer to the center of power and 
commerce.(60)

   While these members of Congress from anti-slavery Iowa thus strongly 
urged division of the territory, those from pro-slavery Missouri merely 
acquiesced in the plan. In the Senate Benton opposed the passage of the 
bill on account of the repeal of the Compromise. Atchison took little part 
in the debate on the bill, but while he said that he thought slavery would 
go into Kansas if the Compromise should be repealed,61 it does not appear 
that he ever urged division.

   In the House, Lindley, Miller, and Oliver discussed the measure but 
said nothing about division. Lindley urged that organization must precede 
settlement, which must precede "that great enterprise of the age, the 
great Pacific railroad." Miller and Oliver discussed the question of 
Indian cessions.

   Facts thus rudely obtrude themselves as a substitute for the guessing 
of the historians as to the primary motive of Douglas for the division 
scheme, namely, subserviency to the hope and intent of the slave power to 
make Kansas a slave state, and they seem positively to preclude that 
theory. On this point there is a strong and significant consensus of 
northern opinion. Douglas himself expressed his belief that it would be 
impracticable to fix slavery upon either of the territories. In his noted 
speech on the 30th of January, 1854, he urged that slaves had actually 
been kept in the Northwest territory in spite of the prohibition of the 
ordinance, and that they were then kept in Nebraska in spite of the 
prohibition of the Missouri Compromise; but the People of all the northern 
territories had abolished slavery as soon as they had the local authority 
to do so. And so he said of Nebraska: "When settlers rush in, when labor 
becomes plenty and therefore cheap, in that climate, with its productions, 
it is worse than folly to think of its being a slaveholding country. I do 
not believe there is a man in Congress who thinks it could be permanently 
a slaveholding country. I have no idea that it could . . . When you give 
them a legislature you thereby confess that they are competent to exercise 
the powers of legislation. If they wish slavery they have a right to it. 
If they do not want it they will not have it, and you should not force it 
upon them."(62)

   Benton in his speech in bitter opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill 
said: "The question of slavery in these territories, if thrown open to a 
territorial action, will be a question of numbers, a question of the 
majority for or against slavery; and what chance would the slaveholders 
have in such a contest? No chance at all. The slave owners will be 
overwhelmed and compelled to play at a most unequal game, not only in 
point of numbers but in point of stakes. The slaveholder stakes his 
property and has to run off or lose it if outvoted at the polls."(63)

   Benton dreaded and deprecated opening anew the slavery contest by the 
proposed repeal of the Compromise. For the sake of peace he had promoted 
the clause in the constitution of Missouri prohibiting the legislature 
from emancipating slaves without the consent of their owners.

   Senator Dodge insisted that, as touching slavery, the bill would have 
the effect of freeing several hundred slaves who would be taken into 
Kansas and Nebraska as domestic servants on the promise of freedom at some 
fixed time. The owners of slaves, he said, would be too timid and 
conservative to take them into new and unfavorable communities in larger 
number.(64) This theory was peculiarly confirmed in Nebraska, and 
doubtless would have been in Kansas after conditions had become settled 
there, but for the Civil war which swept slavery away entirely.

   In his speech in the House, in which he urges the passage of the Kansas-
Nebraska bill with all his powers, Mr. Henn argues that, "These 
territories will, nay must become non-slaveholding states . . . . My 
experience in the settlement of new countries so teaches." Emigration 
moves on a line south of west for the betterment of physical as well 

(60. Appendix Cong. Globe, vol. 29, p. 886.)
(61. Ibid., pp. 939-940.)

(62. Cong. Globe, vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 279.)

(63. Appendix Cong. Globe, vol. 29, p. 560.)
(64. Ibid., p. 382.)

Page 132

as financial conditions. "Hence," he continues, "all of Nebraska, if not 
all of Kansas, will be settled by emigrants from non-slaveholding states. 
Three thousand of these, from free states, are now in the line of Nebraska 
and fifteen hundred on that of Kansas ready to step over as soon as the 
bill passes." A network of railways in this latitude already embraced the 
Mississippi and would soon reach the Missouri.(65) Without a word of 
testimony, unprejudiced eyes should see why commercial and political 
considerations, entirely independent of the slavery question, should have 
discovered the advantages of division to Iowa and Illinois also, and 
stimulated to the utmost their demand for it. Douglas was the natural 
mouthpiece of this sentiment by virtue of his residence in Chicago which 
was vitally interested in securing the location of the Pacific railway as 
a direct extension of her great trunk lines to the West, and of his 
position as chairman of the senate committee on territories. So far from 
being surprising it is quite natural that these advantages of division 
should have appeared and been presented now, when the long-mooted question 
of territorial organization was at last plainly to be settled, and which 
quickened, and for the first time made the question of a Pacific railway 
practicable and imminent. This now certain prospect of the opening of the 
way for giving value to the bordering territory and for the most gigantic 
project for a commercial highway that had yet been imagined suddenly 
increased the importance of every local consideration or possible 
advantage, and resulted in the project of division for northern commercial 
interests and by northern commercial initiative.

   Douglas had from the first striven for a northern territory. His prompt 
acquiescence in the proposal of division is quite explicable and 
consistent when coupled with the fact that his bill of 1844 provided for a 
territory, whose northern boundary line was identical with that of present 
Nebraska and whose southern line was only two degrees farther south than 
the dividing line between the two territories, and with the further fact 
that the proposed northern boundary of his bill of 1848 was that of the 
present state, and the southern boundary was the same as the division line 
between the two territories and states, namely, the 40th parallel.

   But this cogent consistency of circumstance and specific human 
testimony must, it seems, give way to the exigencies of contrary 
historical authority. For we are told in no inconclusive tone and terms 
that,

   We cannot clearly trace the ways leading up to the division of Nebraska 
which apparently formed no part of the original plan. Nor is the 
explanation of Senator Douglas sufficient. It is almost certain that if 
there had been no question of slavery this change would not have been 
made.(66)

   And again: "For the division of the Nebraska country had no meaning if 
it were not made in order to secure a part of it to slavery."(67) This 
author brings to the discussion of the question great ability, but a zeal 
that leaps the bound of fairness and reason. It certainly seems as if he 
has retained his powers to discredit and smirch Douglas to the utmost. 
This palpable predetermination naturally leads to disingenuous if not 
false statements. Thus, to sustain his preconception that the primary 
object of the organization of the Nebraska country, and especially its 
division into two territories, was to further the interests of the 
slavocracy, he insists that there were no white men in the territory, 
keeping back the fact that theoretically or legally there could be none 
since they had been interdicted by the law of Congress of 1834; and he 
neglects to mention the very relevant fact that the advocates of 
organization in Congress rightfully urged that the population would be 
forthcoming, and, more scrupulous than the Israelites of old, in general 
waited legal permission to "go up and possess the land." Organization 
therefore must need precede population, or else be indefinitely postponed. 
Douglas himself completely answered

(65. Appendix Cong Globe, vol. 29, p. 885.)

(66. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. i, p. 439.)

(67. Von Holst, Constitutional History of the United States, vol. iv, p. 
323.)

Page 133

these objections in his great 3d of March speech by correctly stating 
that, in spite of the formal legal prohibition there was a goodly number 
of white settlers within the proposed territory; that there was an immense 
traffic through it to the Pacific coast, now entirely unprotected, and 
organization was necessary on that account; and that people would 
inevitably invade the territory in spite of legal barriers which therefore 
had better be removed in response to the popular demand. The first census 
of Kansas taken within six months after the passage of the organic act 
indicates that there was already a population not far from five thousand. 
Douglas very plausibly if not conclusively established his contention that 
he at least was breaking no new ground and springing no surprise in what 
he regarded as the incidental repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In his 
noted speech in Chicago, October 23, 1850, he had very explicitly and 
broadly generalized the principle which he substituted for the Compromise:

   These measures are predicated on the great fundamental principle that 
every people ought to possess the right of forming and regulating their 
own internal concerns and domestic institutions in their own way . . . 
These things are all confided by the constitution for each state to 
decide, and I know of no reason why the same principle should not be 
confided to territories.

   He cited the forcible fact that the two great political parties -- whig 
and democrat -- in their national conventions in 1852 "adopted and 
affirmed the principles embodied in the compromise measures of 1850 as the 
rules of action by which they would be governed in all future cases in the 
organization of territorial governments and the admission of new 
states."(68)

   Seward, Chase, and Sumner were the principal leaders of the opposition 
to the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Perhaps they had a finer ethical and 
philanthropic instinct and purpose than Douglas. This is doubtless true at 
least of Chase and Sumner. It is true also of Lincoln, whom the new 
opportunity presented by the passage of the bill lured out of the hiding 
into which he had gone discouraged after his unfortunate participation 
with the Whig party in its opposition to the Mexican war, and discouraged 
also by the easy ascendency of Douglas in Illinois. But the position of 
Douglas was far different from that of either of the statesmen named. He 
had the tremendous responsibility of leadership of a party which was 
virtually without opposition and whose dominating element was fatuously 
bent, as it continued to be to its self-destruction, on the expansion of 
slavery. To Douglas fell the colossal task of holding the dominating pro-
slavery element of his party at bay without destroying the party -- and 
the Union. it would be rash to say that Seward, Chase, or Lincoln, who 
were all ambitious, practical politicians, would have done differently in 
Douglas's place. Seward and Lincoln represented politically the echo of 
dying whiggism 

(68 The pertinent declaration of the democratic convention was as follows: 
"Congress has no power under the constitution to interfere with or control 
the domestic institutions of the several states . . . All efforts of the 
abolitionists or others to induce Congress to interfere with questions of 
slavery or to take incipient steps in relation thereto are calculated to 
lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences . . . Therefore the 
Democratic party of the Union, standing on this national platform, will 
abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the 
compromise measures settled by the last Congress." The whigs bore even 
more heavily upon the idea of the general principle: "The series of acts 
of the thirty-second Congress, the act known as the fugitive slave law 
included, are received and acquiesced in by the Whig party of the United 
States as a settlement, in principle and substance, of the dangerous and 
exciting questions which they embrace, and so far as they are concerned we 
will maintain them and insist upon their strict enforcement until time and 
experience shall demonstrate the necessity for further legislation." The 
free-soil democratic convention denounced the compromise measures of 1850 
for "their omission to guarantee freedom in the free territories, and 
their attempt to impose unconstitutional limitations on the powers of 
Congress and the people who admit new states." The free-soilers, however, 
plainly opened the way for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, if it 
were found inexpedient, by declaring, "That the doctrine that any human 
law is a finality and not subject to modification or repeal, is not in 
accordance with the creed of the founders of our government, and is 
dangerous to the liberty of the people." True, both the regular democratic 
and the whig convention resolved in the strongest terms against the 
further agitation of the slavery question in Congress or out; but Douglas 
could easily answer to the implication that he broke or was inclined to 
break these solemn party vows, that the organization of the Nebraska 
country was an enterprise that had been "dear to my heart" for ten years, 
and that he had no thought of mixing it up with the slavery question until 
it was forced upon him at the eleventh hour by greedy and shortsighted 
representatives of the slavocracy.)

Page 134

and Chase had cut loose from the democratic party. It was therefore easy 
for them to join the now swelling chorus of the North and of the civilized 
world against slavery. But Douglas had the misfortune at this critical 
juncture of being the responsible leader of the dominant party and 
personally ambitious as well. Though Seward and Lincoln, and perhaps 
Chase, were already shaping the new antislavery republican party of which 
they were to become the ambitious leaders and the prime beneficiaries, yet 
as their aim was more remote than that of Douglas, its element of 
selfishness was not as apparent. Certain it is that in their early 
leadership of the republican party Seward and Lincoln compromised on the 
slavery question more than Douglas evaded -- more than it was possible for 
him with his impetuous, Napoleonic, dictatorial spirit to trim. The 
dramatic halo of the Civil war, from whose embrace death snatched Douglas 
all too soon -- for he had promptly and unequivocally thrown his weighty 
influence on the side of the Union -- hides all but martyrdom and 
saintship in the character and career of Lincoln, and illuminates, if it 
does not exaggerate the moral heroism of Seward and Chase. It is not 
likely that an impartial estimate of these early republican leaders will 
ever be written. For an opposite reason no impartial or just estimate of 
Douglas has yet appeared.

   ESTIMATE OF DOUGLAS. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill 
there was a memorable struggle in Kansas for six years between the pro-
slavery and anti-slavery forces, both augmented by organized colonization 
from other states, until the unhappy territory was admitted as a state 
without slavery in January, 1861, just as the southern states were busy 
going out of the Union. Actual experience in Kansas with the popular 
sovereignty plan of adjustment was sorry and sorrowful indeed. But this 
was a sorrowful and vexatious question, and under any plan there would 
have been an irrepressible conflict. It should suffice that though under 
Douglas's plan freedom was born in sore travail, yet it seems not 
improbable but for that plan it had not been born at all; and it is to the 
eternal credit of the courage and capacity of Douglas that there is no 
doubt that freedom won the day under his leadership against the now blind 
and mad greed and aggressiveness of the South and the truckling policy of 
Buchanan's Administration. In the trial of a masterful statesman's 
character and career it should be esteemed a weighty matter that 
throughout his course and after he had compassed "the Kansas-Nebraska 
iniquity" this "subservient demagogue" remained the idol of his party in 
the North; that the confidence of the exacting, destructive slave-power of 
the South was, on the other hand, always withheld from him, until it 
finally accomplished his undoing as well as that of his party and the 
Union.

   While calm and ripened public opinion will not hold that Douglas ought 
to have considered uncompromisingly and exclusively the welfare of the 
slave or the immoral quality of slavery, where the life of the Union, as 
well as that of his party, was already at stake, yet, obviously, he lacked 
that sentimental regard and sympathy for the negroes in bondage which the 
civilized world now applauds in Garrison, Phillips, Sumner, and Chase, but 
which in effect coöperated with the fire-eating sentiment of the South in 
precipitating the war which otherwise might have been avoided. Perhaps 
Douglas played a hard-hearted as well as a desperate game, not guiltless 
of finesse, with his overbearing, cunning, and outnumbering southern party 
associates; and perhaps he was over-selfish in yielding to the 
preposterous demand of a part of them for the repeal of the Compromise. 
But it would be rash as well as unjust to draw the sweeping conclusion 
that his ultimate motive was not patriotic or that he did not sincerely 
believe that his substitute for the Compromise offered the most 
practicable solution of the momentous and vexatious question with which he 
was confronted.

   It was apparently not until some years after its passage that Nebraska 
was relegated to the rear in the name of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and was 
thus deprived by its Jayhawker neighbor of its immemorial prece-

Page 135

dence and of the full flame or notoriety of its relation to this famous or 
infamous act. Douglas constantly referred to it as the Nebraska bill as 
late, at least, as the time of his debates with Lincoln in 1858; but in 
his noted article in Harper's Magazine, of September, 1839, he commits the 
error of stating that the act "is now known on the statute book as the 
Kansas-Nebraska act." The act is in fact entitled in the statute as "an 
act to organize the territories of Nebraska and Kansas"; but the Illinois 
democratic convention of 1860 called the measure by its present name. The 
misnomer, and the usurpation by Kansas of first place in the name, may 
probably be credited to the fact that it is more easily spoken in that 
form, and that the spectacular and tragical political procedure in 
"bleeding Kansas" during the years immediately following the passage of 
the bill gave the territory the full place in the public eye to the 
exclusion of Nebraska with the comparatively tame events of its 
organization.

   Thus Louisiana territory was conceived by the exigencies and on the 
threshold of a mighty international struggle which resulted in the 
annihilation of the greatest and most imperious of potentates; and 
Nebraska, child of Louisiana, was conceived by the exigencies and in the 
beginning of a great national struggle, in which the no less imperious 
power of human slavery was also to meet its doom.

   The organic acts for Nebraska and Kansas which were finally adopted 
contained a guarantee, not found in the bills offered by Douglas in 1844 
and 1848, that the boundaries should not "include any territory which by 
treaty with any Indian tribe is not, without the consent of said tribe, to 
be included within the territorial limits or jurisdiction of any state or 
territory; but all such territory shall be excepted out of the boundaries 
and constitute no part of the territory of Nebraska until such tribe shall 
signify their assent to the president of the United States to be included 
within the said territory of Nebraska." This clause was inserted in the 
Indian provisions of the Richardson bill, doubtless as a result of the 
strenuous opposition to the organization of the territory on the part of 
the East and Southwest, and it was retained in the Dodge bill.

   PROPOSED BOUNDARIES. The bill of 1844 provided that "the existing laws 
of the territory of Iowa shall be extended over the said territory," but 
"the governor, secretary, and territorial judge or a majority of them, 
shall have power and authority to repeal such of the laws of the territory 
of Iowa as they may consider inapplicable and to adopt in their stead such 
laws of any of the states or other territories as they may consider 
necessary," subject to the approval of Congress; thus following the 
principle of the original provisions of the Ordinance of 1787 for 
territories of the first grade. This bill of 1844 followed the Ordinance 
of 1787 in providing for a second grade or representative government; but 
while under the Ordinance five thousand free male inhabitants were 
required as a condition precedent to legislative government, under the 
Douglas bill the requirement was five thousand inhabitants merely, only 
excepting Indians. The Ordinance provided that an elector should own fifty 
acres of land in his representative district, and that to be eligible to 
membership in the legislature one should own two hundred acres of land 
within his district; the Douglas bill required no property qualification 
in either case, but that members of the legislature should have the same 
qualifications as voters. While the Ordinance did not, specifically at 
least, exclude negroes from the elective franchise, the Douglas bill 
limited that right to free white male citizens for the first election and 
empowered the legislature to define the suffrage qualifications thereafter.

   On the 7th day of January, 1845, A. V. Brown of Tennessee, member of 
the House committee on territories, reported a bill amendatory to the 
Douglas bill which required that there should be five thousand white 
inhabitants before the territory should be entitled to a legislature. This 
bill also changed the provisions of the original bill relating to the 
judiciary system.

   The boundary described in the bill of 1848 differed from that of the 
bill of 1844 in start-

Page 136

ing where the 40th parallel of latitude crosses the Missouri river instead 
of at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers -- a little above 
39°; in running to the 43d parallel instead of the mouth of the Niobrara 
river, a little to the south, and then following the river to that 
parallel; and on the south in running along the 40th parallel instead of 
the devious course, ending at the east on the 38th parallel as already 
outlined. The bill of 1848 followed Brown's amendment in requiring five 
thousand white inhabitants before change to legislative government and 
also in the provisions for the judiciary, and the bill of 1844 in 
requiring the approval of the enactments of the legislature by Congress 
before they should become valid. In other respects the bills in question 
are all essentially alike.

   The boundary described in the Richardson bill of February 2, 1853, 
differed from its predecessor of 1848 in following the summit of the Rocky 
mountains on the west instead of a right line south from the point of 
intersection of the northern line with the mountains which did not 
appreciably alter the western boundary of the part of the territory 
included in the bill of 1848 -- and in adopting the northern line of New 
Mexico and the parallel of 36o 30' instead of the 40th parallel as the 
boundary on the south.

   In the Richardson bill the feature of legislation by the governor, 
secretary, and territorial judge is left out, and legislation by a general 
assembly from the first is provided for; but all enactments of the 
legislature must be approved by Congress to become effective. Only free 
white male citizens could vote or hold office. Since the territory was to 
pass its own laws, the provision of the bill of 1848, extending the laws 
of Iowa over the territory except as they might be repealed by the 
governor, secretary, and judge was dropped. With these exceptions the 
bills were essentially alike.

   The boundaries in the Dodge bill of December 14, 1853, were identical 
with those of the Richardson bill and the bills were otherwise alike in 
all important provisions. The boundary of the final organic act differed 
from that of the Richardson and Dodge bills in taking in all the remainder 
of the Louisiana Purchase on the north, except that part of Minnesota 
lying west of the Mississippi river, instead of running only to the 43d 
parallel; and on the south in running down to the 37th parallel instead of 
36 degrees 30'. There are two other important points of difference between 
the final organic act and the bills which preceded it, namely, that of the 
famous provision with regard to slavery and the dropping of the provision 
that legislation by the territorial assembly must be approved by Congress 
to become operative. This proviso was retained even in the substitute of 
January 23, 1854. The other bills also provided that the governor should 
act as superintendent of Indian affairs in place of those officers 
stationed at St. Louis, but this feature was dropped from the final bill.

   The similarity of the main provisions of all these bills is explained 
by the fact that they, like the organic acts of all the territories which 
have been organized since 1787, except that of Florida, which was 
patterned after the Louisiana act, were constructed upon the framework of 
the immortal Ordinance of the Northwest Territory. Nebraska was 
distinguished in being the first territory with an elective legislature 
whose laws were not required to be submitted to Congress for approval 
before becoming effective. This submission was not required by the 
Ordinance of 1787, presumably because the governor, whose assent to 
legislative acts was required, and the upper house of the legislature were 
appointed by the president of the United States. There was a. departure 
from this principle in the case of the territorial government at 
Orleans -- the first government established by the United States within 
the Louisiana Purchase. Though the governor and the legislative body, 
consisting of a council of thirteen members, were appointed by the 
president, yet, as they were residents of the territory so lately alien in 
fact, and still so in spirit, it was doubtless deemed discreet that 
Congress should have the power of vetoing their enactments. The organic 
acts of

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the earlier territories, such as Indiana, Mississippi, Michigan, Illinois, 
and Kentucky and Tennessee of the southwest territory followed closely the 
Ordinance of 1787. Missouri, the first territory organized after the 
original division of the Louisiana Purchase into the territory of Orleans 
and the district of Louisiana, was at once allowed a legislative assembly, 
though the members of the upper house were appointed by the president.

   In the organic act of Indiana, however, (1800) the first division of 
the Northwest Territory, a provision that the terriory might have a 
legislature, "so soon as the governor thereof shall be satisfied that it 
is the desire of a majority of the freeholders thereof," was substituted 
for the rigid condition of the Ordinance of 1787 requiring five thousand 
free male inhabitants. No provision was made for a legislature in the 
organic act of the district of Louisiana (1805), and that of Michigan 
passed the same year merely adopted the Ordinance of 1787. The right of 
freeholders to decide when a legislature should be established was left to 
Illinois (1809) and Arkansas (1819). The organic act of Missouri (1812), 
and all the territories established after 1809 provided for immediate 
legislative assemblies. Wisconsin (1836), the next territory organized -- 
excepting Florida -- was the first to come in with the right to elect both 
houses of the legislature, but the act contained the offset that "all the 
laws of the governor and legislative, assembly shall be submitted to, and, 
if disapproved by the Congress of the United States, the same shall be 
null and of no effect." This provision for submission of the enactments to 
Congress was incorporated in the organic acts of all the territories 
organized from that time until Nebraska and Kansas were reached. Such 
undemocratic surveillance would have been galling to the spirit of popular 
sovereignty which pervaded the Kansas-Nebraska act, and the two principles 
were quite incompatible.

   Under the Ordinance of 1787 members of the legislative council were 
required to be freeholders to the extent of five hundred acres, and 
electors, fifty acres. Members of the council of thirteen of the territory 
of Orleans were required to be holders of real estate. In the Missouri 
territorial act members of the council were required to own two hundred 
acres of land, and members of the house were required to be freeholders; 
only free white males who were taxpayers could vote. This provision of the 
Missouri act was applied to Arkansas.

   While the Ordinance of 1787 did not specifically restrict the suffrage 
of whites, it did provide that appointment should be based upon the number 
of free males. The act of Congress (1808) "extending the right of 
suffrage" in Missouri restricted it to free white males, but who should 
also hold fifty acres of land in accordance with the Ordinance of 1787. 
This restriction of suffrage to "free white males" is found in every 
subsequent territorial act to and including that of Montana passed in 
1864, excepting those of Oregon and Washington in which the term "white 
male" is used. But, beginning with Wisconsin, and until Wyoming was 
reached, the legislative assemblies of the territories were left free by 
the organic acts to prescribe the qualifications of voters.