The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics by Christopher Childers, and: Stephen A. Douglas and Antebellum Democracy by Martin H. Quitt (review)

Joining a growing body of scholarship that traces sectional strife back into the early republic, Christopher Childers and Martin H. Quitt reevaluate popular sovereignty from a chronologically expanded perspective. Generations of historians have scrutinized the fiercely contested doctrine, which held that local majorities rather than Congress should decide slavery’s fate in the West. But many accounts neglect its history prior to 1847, when presidential aspirant Lewis Cass endorsed popular sovereignty as a solution to the dangerous controversy unleashed by the conquest of northern Mexico. In contrast, Childers and Quitt engage popular sovereignty’s lengthy and complex history, by challenging the notion that it was merely an expedient concocted by self-serving politicians, Childers through a political history of slavery and territorial expansion from the 1780s to 1861, and Quitt through a study of Stephen Douglas, popular sovereignty’s most famous advocate.

In The Failure of Popular Sovereignty, Childers shows that the concept of territorial self-government emerged in the early republic and dominated subsequent disputes over slavery’s extension. But his thesis hinges on change over time. Contests over defining and applying popular sovereignty “transformed and radicalized southern politics” and “eventually led the South outside the mainstream of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics” (5). Childers’s narrative brims with irony: proslavery extremists ultimately rejected popular sovereignty, even though territorial self-government had been implemented to appease southerners’ professed fidelity to states’ rights and localism. Early territorial policy divided the western domain in two, barring slavery north of the Ohio River and relying on popular sovereignty to determine its status farther south, with the Missouri Compromise extending the principle of bifurcation into the Louisiana Purchase. Most leading southerners championed popular sovereignty in states such as Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri, where slavery’s foothold ensured that deference to localism would yield proslavery outcomes. A vocal radical minority, led by John C. Calhoun after 1837, denounced the Missouri Compromise for conceding federal authority over the territories, insisting that only upon statehood could westerners outlaw slavery. Until then, neither Congress nor territorial legislatures could bar the institution.

Childers deftly analyzes tensions between southern radicals and moderates, showing that the former gained power as popular sovereignty became imbued with antislavery implications. Southern politics reached a crossroads in the 1840s, when northern Democrats embraced popular sovereignty in hopes of settling the dispute over the Mexican Cession and reunifying their party. They quickly encountered several obstacles, including popular sovereignty’s ambiguity: northerners maintained that territorial legislatures could prohibit slavery, while southerners argued that only state constitutional conventions could do so. Moreover, conditions in the far southwest were profoundly different from those in territorial Missouri. Slaveholders could not depend on popular sovereignty to protect slavery where the institution lacked significant public support. By 1850, many southern politicians branded popular sovereignty and its northern adherents as antislavery. Eager to expand slavery into Kansas, they briefly rejoined some northern Democrats beneath the popular sovereignty banner in 1854, but the alliance collapsed under the weight of incompatible definitions. Not even the Supreme Court’s proslavery interpretation of popular sovereignty in the Dred Scott decision reconciled southern radicals to the doctrine. Instead, they agitated for a federal slave code for the territories, splintered the Democratic Party, and dissolved the Union.

Childers significantly advances our understanding of how inter- and intrasectional debates about popular sovereignty shaped southern politics throughout the conflict over slavery’s expansion. But his emphasis on a fundamental clash between “northern nationalism and southern states’ rights advocates,” especially as outlined in the book’s introduction, exaggerates the irony of slaveholders’ abandonment of popular sovereignty (2). Their position on the fugitive slave issue, among others, shows that planter...