WASHINGTON, The Story of the Negro, Vol. I, pp. 215-250; MCMASTER, Vol. VII, pp. 240-257; HART, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 28-53; ALEXANDER JOHNSTON (ed. J. A. Woodburn), American Political History, 1763–1876, Vol. II pp. 127-140.

4. Gold and Politics in California, 1849-1850: JOSIAH ROYCE, California, pp. 220-246, 278-356; E. E. SPARKS, The Expansion of the American People, pp. 336-350; RHODES, Vol. I, pp. 111-116; SCHOULER, Vol. V, pp. 130-146; J. S. HITTELL, The Discovery of Gold in California (Century Magazine, Vol. XIX, pp. 525-536); MCMASTER, Vol. VII, pp. 585-614; BAYARD TAYLOR, El Dorado.

5. Mid-Century Plans for a Canal across the Isthmus: MCMASTER, Vol. VII, pp. 552-577; LATANÉ, Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish America, pp. 176–195; T. J. LAWRENCE, Disputed Questions in Modern International Law, pp. 89-142; W. F. JOHNSON, Four Centuries of the Panama Canal, pp. 51-77; HENRY HUBERICH, The Trans-Isthmian Canal, pp. 6-15.

PART VI. THE CRISIS OF DISUNION

CHAPTER XIV

APPROACHING THE CRISIS

THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE AND THE FORMATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

426. The Louisiana Purchase Territory in 1850. By the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 all the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the line 36° 30', except the state of Missouri itself, was closed to slavery. It was an immense region of over half a million square miles, larger than all the free states east of the Mississippi River combined. While the attention of the country had been fixed on the annexation of Texas, the acquisition of the territory of Oregon in the Far West, the Mexican War, and the organization of the vast Mexican cession of California and New Mexico, this Louisiana territory had remained almost unnoticed. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century only the single state of Iowa (1846) and the single territory of Minnesota (1849) had been formed out of it. The rest of the region, extending from the Missouri River to the Rockies, was unorganized Indian territory in 1850, with less than 1000 white inhabitants. The addition to our domain, however, of the land west of the Rockies at once made the organization of the middle part of the Louisiana region (then known as Nebraska) important as a link between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific. Thousands of emigrants were passing through the country on their way to the gold fields of California, and the settlers of Missouri and Iowa, with the irrepressible American frontier spirit, were eager to drive the Indians from their borders and to press westward into the rich valleys of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers.

427. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. was chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. He was a

self-made man of tremendous energy, a masterful politician, and an unrivaled debater, who had come from a Vermont farm to the new Western country as a very young man and had risen rapidly through minor offices to a judgeship in the supreme court of Illinois. He was sent to the House of Representatives in 1843 and to the Senate in 1846. Although then but thirty-three years of age, Douglas immediately assumed an important place in the Senate through his brilliant powers of debate. He was soon recognized as the leader of the Democratic party in the North, and after the death of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster he became the foremost figure in American public life. On January 4, 1854, Douglas reported a bill for the organization of the territory west of Missouri (Nebraska) on the principle of "squatter sovereignty" as set forth in the Compromise of 1850.

Douglas did not mention the Missouri Compromise in this bill, but some days later, on the advice of the Southern senators, and with the approval of President Pierce, he substituted for it a new bill which expressly repealed the Missouri Compromise and divided the territory into two parts by the parallel of 40° north latitude,- Kansas to the south (into which it was expected slavery would enter) and Nebraska to the north (which would probably be free soil).

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

428. Effect of the Bill on the North. The indignation of the North over the proposed annulment of the Missouri Compromise was instantaneous and strong. The day after the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was reported, the Free-Soil men in Congress, led by Senator Chase of Ohio, issued a spirited protest entitled "The Appeal of the Independent Democrats." They denounced the bill as "a gross violation of a sacred pledge" and called upon all good citizens to protest by every means possible against "this enormous crime." Hundreds of mass meetings were held in the North to denounce the bill. The legislatures of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Wisconsin sent their protests to Congress. Senator Seward of New

York wrote, "The storm that is rising is such a one as this country has never yet seen." Douglas was denounced as a turncoat, a traitor, a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, who had sold himself to the South for the presidential nomination. He was burned in effigy so frequently that he himself said he could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of the fires.

429. Motives for Douglas's Action. Douglas had voted in the House for the 36° 30' line at the time of the annexation of Texas in 1845, and declared in a speech in the Senate four years later that the Missouri Compromise was (( canonized in the hearts of the American people as a thing which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb." Yet he now maintained that by the Compromise of 1850 the American people had substituted for the principle of a line dividing free territory from slave territory the new principle of the choice of the people of the territory themselves, and that he acquiesced gladly in that change of principle. Douglas's motive for thus shifting his ground is not wholly clear. It is true that he could not hope to win the Democratic nomination for president without the favor of the South, and that the men who in all probability would be his rivals for the nomination in 1856 were all, in one way or another, courting the favor of the South in 1854.1 It is true also that he was heavily interested in railway projects for opening up the Far West. But all this does not prove that Douglas, with his hearty confidence in the ability of the people of a locality to manage their own affairs, was not perfectly honest in preferring the "popular-sovereignty" principle of 1850 to the Missouri-Compromise principle of 1820.

430. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed. In the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill Douglas proved himself the master of all his opponents. Alone he faced the fire of Wade, Chase, Seward, Sumner, and Everett, all masterly speakers,-meeting their attacks at every point with a vigor and tact which won even from his adversaries expressions of admiration. On March 4, 1854, after a continuous session of seventeen hours, Douglas carried the bill through the Senate by a vote of 37 to 14. It passed the House on May 22 by

1 These men were President Pierce, who was almost slavishly following the guidance of his Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis; Secretary of State Marcy, who advocated the annexation of Cuba; and our minister to England, Buchanan, who signed the Ostend Manifesto.

the close vote of 113 to 100 and was signed by Pierce. Thus the Missouri Compromise, for thirty-four years "canonized in the hearts of the American people," was repealed, and 485,000 square miles of territory that had been "forever" dedicated to freedom were opened to the slaveholder. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the foremost historian of this period, says that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was "the most

momentous measure that passed Congress from the day that the Senators and Representatives first met to the outbreak of the Civil War." It was the end of compromise on the slavery question. It was the declaration on the part of the South that no more lines of latitude or acts of Congress could debar slavery from the territories of the United States. It suddenly woke the North to the realization that nothing would satisfy the slaveholder short of the recognition of slavery as a national institution.

431. Growth of Abolitionist Sentiment. The first effect of the bill was a great accession to the antislavery ranks in the North.