86

238 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

note the facility with which the statesmanship of a section of the country
adapted its convictions to changed conditions. When it was found that the
doctrine of popular sovereignty (first I think invented by General Cass, and
afterwards adopted by Stephen A. Douglas) failed to make Kansas a slave
State, and could not be safely trusted in other emergencies, southern statesmen
promptly abandoned and reprobated that doctrine, and took what they
considered firmer ground. They lost faith in the rights, powers, and wisdom
of the people and took refuge in the Constitution. Henceforth the favorite
doctrine of the South was that the people of a territory had no voice in the
matter of slavery whatever; that the Constitution of the United States, of its
own force and effect, carried slavery safely into any territory of the United
States and protected the system there until it ceased to be a territory and
became a State. The practical operation of this doctrine would be to make all
the future new States slaveholding States, for slavery once planted and nursed
for years in a territory would easily strengthen itself against the evil day and
defy eradication. This doctrine was in some sense supported by Chief Justice
Taney, in the infamous Dred Scott decision. This new ground, however, was
destined to bring misfortune to its inventors, for it divided for a time the
democratic party, one faction of it going with John C. Breckinridge and the
other espousing the cause of Stephen A. Douglas; the one held firmly to the
doctrine that the United States Constitution, without any legislation, territorial,
national, or otherwise, by its own force and effect, carried slavery into all
the territories of the United States: the other held that the people of a territory
had the right to admit slavery or reject slavery, as in their judgment they might
deem best. Now, while this war of words — this conflict of doctrines — was in
progress, the portentous shadow of a stupendous civil war became more and
more visible. Bitter complaints were raised by the slaveholders that they were
about to be despoiled of their proper share in territory won by a common
valor, or bought by a common treasure. The North, on the other hand, or
rather a large and growing party at the North, insisted that the complaint was
unreasonable and groundless; that nothing properly considered as property
was excluded or meant to be excluded from the territories; that southern men
could settle in any territory of the United States with some kinds of property,
and on the same footing and with the same protection as citizens of the North;
that men and women are not property in the same sense as houses, lands,
horses, sheep, and swine are property, and that the fathers of the Republic
neither intended the extension nor the perpetuity of slavery; that liberty is
national, and slavery is sectional. From 1856 to 1860 the whole land rocked
with this great controversy. When the explosive force of this controversy had