CHAPTER V.

THE TERRITORIAL QUESTION.—AN INCIDENT AT the White House.—The Kansas and Nebraska Bill.—The Missouri Compromise abrogated in 1850, not in 1854.—Origin of “Squatter Sovereignty."—Sectional Rivalry and its Consequences.—The Emigrant Aid Societies.—"The Bible and Sharpe’s Rifles."—False Pretensions as to Principle.—The Strife in Kansas.—A Retrospect.—The Original Equilibrium of Power and its Overthrow.—Usurpations of the Federal Government.—The Protective Tariff.—Origin and Progress of Abolitionism.—Who were the Friends of the Union?—An Illustration of Political Morality.

The organization of the Territory of Kansas was the first question that gave rise to exciting debate after my return to the Senate. The celebrated Kansas-Nebraska Bill had become a law during the Administration of Mr. Pierce. As this occupies a large space in the political history of the period, it is proper to state some facts connected with it, which were not public, but were known to me and to others yet living.

The declaration, often repeated in 1850, that climate and the will of the people concerned should determine their institutions when they should form a Constitution, and as a State be admitted into the Union, and that no legislation by Congress should be permitted to interfere with the free exercise of that will when so expressed, was but the announcement of the fact so firmly established in the Constitution, that sovereignty resided alone in the States, and that Congress had only delegated powers. It has been sometimes contended that, because the Congress of the Confederation, by the Ordinance of 1787, prohibited involuntary servitude in all the Northwestern Territory, the framers of the Constitution must have recognized such power to exist in the Congress of the United States. Hence the deduction that the prohibitory clause of what is known as the Missouri Compromise was justified by the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787. To make the action of the Congress of the Confederation a precedent for the Congress of the United States is to overlook the great distinction between the two.

The Congress of the Confederation represented the States in their sovereignty, and, as such representatives, had legislative, executive, and, in some degree, judicial power confided to it. Virtually, it was an assemblage of the States. In certain cases a majority of nine States were required to decide a question, but there is no express limitation, or restriction, such as is to be found in the ninth and tenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The General Government of the Union is composed of three departments, of which the Congress is the legislative branch, and which is checked by the revisory power of the judiciary, and the veto power of the Executive, and, above all, is expressly limited in legislation to powers expressly delegated by the States. If, then, it be admitted, which is certainly questionable, that the Congress of the Confederation had power to exclude slave property northwest of the Ohio River, that power must have been derived from its character as representing the States in their sovereignty, for no indication of such a power is to be found in the Articles of Confederation.

If it be assumed that the absence of a prohibition was equivalent to the admission of the power in the Congress of the Confederation, the assumption would avail nothing in the Congress under the Constitution, where power is expressly limited to what had been delegated. More briefly, it may be stated that the Congress of the Confederation could, like the Legislature of a State, do what had not been prohibited; but the Congress of the United States could only do what had been expressly permitted. It is submitted whether this last position is not conclusive against the possession of power by the United States Congress to legislate slavery into or exclude it from Territories belonging to the United States.

This subject, which had for more than a quarter of a century been one of angry discussion and sectional strife, was revived, and found occasion for renewed discussion in the organization of Territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska. The Committees on Territories of the two Houses agreed to report a bill in accordance with that recognized principle, provided they could first be assured that it would receive favorable consideration from the President. This agreement was made on Saturday, and the ensuing Monday was the day (and the only day for two weeks) on which, according to the order of business established by the rules of the House of Representatives, the bill could be introduced by the Committee of that House.

On Sunday morning, the 22d of January, 1854, gentlemen of each Committee called at my house, and Mr. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee, fully explained the proposed bill, and stated their purpose to be, through my aid, to obtain an interview on that day with the President, to ascertain whether the bill would meet his approbation. The President was known to be rigidly opposed to the reception of visits on Sunday for the discussion of any political subject; but in this case it was urged as necessary, in order to enable the Committee to make their report the next day. I went with them to the Executive mansion, and, leaving them in the reception-room, sought the President in his private apartments, and explained to him the occasion of the visit. He thereupon met the gentlemen, patiently listened to the reading of the bill and their explanations of it, decided that it rested upon sound constitutional principles, and recognized in it only a return to that rule which had been infringed by the compromise of 1820, and the restoration of which had been foreshadowed by the legislation of 1850. This bill was not, therefore, as has been improperly asserted, a measure inspired by Mr. Pierce or any of his Cabinet. Nor was it the first step taken toward the repeal of the conditions or obligations expressed or implied by the establishment, in 1820, of the politico-sectional line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes. That compact had been virtually abrogated, in 1850, by the refusal of the representatives of the North to apply it to the territory then recently acquired from Mexico. In May, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed; its purpose was declared in the bill itself to be to carry into practical operation the “propositions and principles established by the compromise measures of 1850″ The “Missouri Compromise,” therefore, was not repealed by that bill—its virtual repeal by the legislation of 1850 was recognized as an existing fact, and it was declared to be “inoperative and void.”

It was added that the “true intent and meaning” of the act was “not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.”

From the terms of this bill, as well as from the arguments that were used in its behalf, it is evident that its purpose was to leave the Territories equally open to the people of all the States, with every species of property recognized by any of them; to permit climate and soil to determine the current of immigration, and to secure to the people themselves the right to form their own institutions according to their own will, as soon as they should acquire the right of self-government; that is to say, as soon as their numbers should entitle them to organize themselves into a State, prepared to take its place as an equal, sovereign member of the Federal Union. The claim, afterward advanced by Mr. Douglas and others, that this declaration was intended to assert the right of the first settlers of a Territory, in its inchoate, rudimental, dependent, and transitional condition, to determine the character of its institutions, constituted the doctrine popularly known as “squatter sovereignty.” Its assertion led to the dissensions which ultimately resulted in a rupture of the Democratic party.

Sectional rivalry, the deadly foe of the “domestic tranquillity” and the “general welfare,” which the compact of union was formed to insure, now interfered, with gigantic efforts, to prevent that free migration which had been promised, and to hinder the decision by climate and the interests of the inhabitants of the institutions to be established by these embryo States. Societies were formed in the North to supply money and send emigrants into the new Territories; and a famous preacher, addressing a body of those emigrants, charged them to carry with them to Kansas “the Bible and Sharpe’s rifles.” The latter were of course to be leveled against the bosoms of their Southern brethren who might migrate to the same Territory, but the use to be made of the Bible in the same fraternal enterprise was left unexplained by the reverend gentleman.

The war-cry employed to train the Northern mind for the deeds contemplated by the agitators was “No extension of slavery!” Was this sentiment real or feigned? The number of slaves (as has already been clearly shown) would not have been increased by their transportation to new territory. It could not be augmented by further importation, for the law of the land made that piracy. Southern men were the leading authors of that enactment, and the public opinion of their descendants, stronger than the law, fully sustained it....