1854] Douglas and popular sovereignty. 427 the spokesman and leader of his party in Congress. He more boldly and explicitly than any other man pronounced the question of the extension or exclusion of slavery where the western lands were filling up a thing to be determined by the settlers themselves, upon a free principle of self- government with which Congress and the federal authorities ought not to interfere. And there was a particular part of the western country to which he wished to see his principle applied at once. This was the broad " Platte country " which lay within the Louisiana purchase to the northward and westward of Missouri. Across it ran the direct overland route to the Pacific, along which frequent waggon-trains moved to and fro between California and the East. There was some danger that it might be assigned as a reservation to the Indians and closed to settle- ment; and ever since 1843, when he was a member of the House of Representatives, before the days of the Mexican cessions, Douglas had been urging the erection of this great stretch of prairie into a Territory, not as a road to the Pacific for in those days no one knew of the gold in California but as a new home for settlers and common- wealths. Early in January, 1854, being chairman of the Senate's Committee on Territories, and seeing his own party in power, he returned to his favourite scheme and introduced a bill which provided for the creation of a Territory to be called Nebraska, in the Platte country. Every previous proposal for the erection of Territories within the region covered by this bill had assumed, as a matter settled and of course, that slavery was to be excluded from it, under the Compromise of 1820 ; for it lay north of the southern line of Missouri ; but this bill explicitly provided that the States subsequently to be formed out of the new territory were to be left to decide the question of the introduction of slavery for themselves, in accordance with what Senator Douglas called the principle of "popular sovereignty.' 1 His opponents called it the doctrine of " squatter sovereignty." The bill was presently withdrawn and amended. When reintroduced from the Committee on January 23, it provided for the creation of two Territories instead of one a Territory of Kansas, west of Missouri, and a Territory of Nebraska, north-west of the old compromise State. But the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill" did not differ from the measure for which it was substituted in the matter of slavery. It was declared in the new bill to be the " true intent and meaning " of the Act, "not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." It extended all laws of the United States, including the Fugitive Slave Law, to the new Territories, but explicitly excepted "the eighth section of the Act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the Union." the compromise section, which had been considered one of the foundations of national politics. That CH. XIII.
