Popular sovereignty was put forth in the late 1840s as the moderate answer to the question of whether or not sLAvERY should be extended into the territories. It offered a deceptively simple solution: let the settlers of a territory decide for themselves if they wished to enter the Union as a slave or a free state, without the interference, for or against, of the federal government.
Significantly, northern Democrats first developed the concept as an alternative to the Wilmot Proviso (1846), which would have unilaterally banned slavery from the territories acquired in the Mexican-American War. The proviso was alarmingly popular in the North among both Democrats and Whigs, but deeply repugnant to the southern wing of the Democratic Party. Popular sovereignty seemed to offer a middle way between the extremes of the proslavery advocates and free-labor positions that were threatening the harmony of the Union. It would also preserve the strength of the national Democratic Party.
First introduced in Congress by New York’s Democratic senator Daniel S. Dickinson, popular sovereignty received its most important early support in 1847 from Lewis Cass, a Democratic senator from Michigan and presidential hopeful. Cass declared that the doctrine should become a policy of the Democratic Party. He denied that Congress had the constitutional right to exclude slavery from the territories, and emphasized the pleasing but ambiguous notion that such decisions were best left to the people themselves. Voters of both sections could support the doctrine, but among other flaws, popular sovereignty left wide open the question of when settlers should make this decision.
Northerners wanted territorial legislatures to make the decision before applying for statehood. They worried that by the time a territory became a state, it would be too late to vote slavery out. This was because the legal structure supporting slavery would already exist and would in turn promote the continued settlement of slaveholders. Southerners assumed the exact opposite and were adamant that neither Congress nor territorial governments had the right to exclude slavery from a territory. To the contrary, they believed that slavery could not be voted in or out until after the territory drafted its constitution in the process of applying for statehood.
Popular sovereignty was included in the Compromise of 1850, which allowed territorial legislatures in New Mexico and Utah to pass slave codes before filing their state constitutions. The key test of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, however, came in its application to the organization and settlement of land that was not acquired from the Mexican-American War, but rather the last parcel of unorganized land from an earlier land purchase.
In order to get the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 passed with southern support, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois agreed to abolish the 1820 Missouri Compromise line that divided free and slave states in the Louisiana Territories. This act set off a firestorm of protest in the North that led to the “little civil war” in the Kansas territory. It was the beginning of the end for popular sovereignty, which was now in danger of being rejected by both northerners and southerners. As the Kansas fiasco unfolded, the newly elected president James Buchanan hoped that the Supreme Court would decide once and for all the question of slavery in the territories.
In December 1857, the Court’s verdict against Dred Scott dealt popular sovereignty and the Missouri Compromise the final blow. The decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford asserted that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories, which alarmed many northerners. The decision went further to state that no one, not even the territorial legislatures, could properly exclude slave property from the territories, popular will or not. This part of the opinion was problematical for Democrats. Ever the optimist, Stephen A. Douglas asserted that while Dred Scott guaranteed the slaveholder’s constitutional rights, slavery could not exist without protective laws voted on by a majority of settlers, whom he assumed would be antislavery. Douglas failed to revive the doctrine in any meaningful fashion, and popular sovereignty faded from the political arena as a viable compromise position to deciding the fate of slavery in the territories.
Further reading: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kenneth Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
—Chad Vanderford
World History
