THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
numbers and moral strength, but the Federal Administration used its power in the efforts to force slavery upon that Territory so openly and unscrupulously that several of its own officers refused to obey it, and Senator Douglas himself recoiled from the use that was being made of the weapons he had put into the hands of the slave power by his repeal of the Missouri Compromise and his doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty,” according to which not Congress, but only the people of a Territory should have the power to exclude slavery therefrom.
There is in our history no more striking example of a political leader falling a victim to his own contrivances. It was a tragedy of highest dramatic interest—Douglas vainly struggling in the coils of fate, or rather of his own doctrines. From 1851 to 1854 the slavery question seemed to be in a quiescent state. Indeed, the eternal antagonism between freedom and slavery was smouldering beneath the surface, but during one of those intervals of torpid conscience which sometimes occur between periods of excited struggle, the surface at least was comparatively calm. Multitudes of people who had felt strongly upon the subject enjoyed a sort of indolent relief in dismissing the slavery question from their thoughts. Then Douglas violently roused the public mind from its temporary lethargy by proposing, in his Nebraska Bill, to sweep away the legal barriers which had shielded certain Territories from the ingress of slavery on the until then unheard-of ground, that such prohibition was adverse to the spirit of the Constitution, and that according to the true principle of “Popular Sovereignty” the people of all the Territories should be left free to exclude slavery or to admit it even if, until then, it had been legally excluded. There was at the time no public call for so startling a measure. The American people had ac-
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