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  • Stephen A. Douglas and a Doomed Doctrine
  • John Ashworth (bio)
Christopher Childers. The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. xii + 334 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $39.95.
Martin H. Quitt. Stephen A. Douglas and Antebellum Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 210 pp. Appendix and index. $24.99.

Perhaps because of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, books continue to pour out on the politics of the 1850s. Interest in Abraham Lincoln is probably as great as it ever has been among the general public and professional scholars alike. Nor is his greatest antebellum rival suffering neglect. At least until Lincoln’s entry into the White House, Stephen A. Douglas was his principal adversary. While Lincoln stood for federal prevention of the extension of slavery into the territories, Douglas was instead strongly associated with the doctrine of popular sovereignty, by which the inhabitants of the territory itself, rather than Congress, would take the key decisions concerning slavery. Christopher Childers and Martin Quitt have written books that are centrally concerned with Douglas or his doctrine. Quitt focuses on Douglas, Childers on the doctrine.

These two volumes are exercises in political history—the one essentially biographical, the other primarily constitutional in focus. Clearly neither author (in common with many other students of antebellum political history) believes that an analysis of slavery itself and its points of conflict with a free-labor system is relevant to his task. Both are profoundly mistaken.

Childers’ volume traces the origins of popular sovereignty from the beginnings of the Republic to its final collapse in 1861. Its heyday was the 1840s and 1850s, when it provoked an extraordinary degree of interest and controversy. Popular sovereignty by the mid-1840s was widely recognized as occupying a middle ground between the (overwhelmingly Northern) advocates of Congressional exclusion of slavery in the territories on one side, and, on the other, those (almost all Southerners) who claimed that the right of slaveholders to take their slaves into the territories was guaranteed by the Federal Constitution. Devolving the decisions on slavery to those in the territories was thus [End Page 71] a compromise solution. As such, it vied with the other compromise solution that was on offer, the one that had been employed as a result of the crisis over Missouri a generation earlier. At that time, Congress had, of course, drawn a line in the West below which slavery would be allowed but above which it would be prohibited.

The drawing of a line in the sand, as it were, over which slavery could not go was a policy that was nothing if not clear and transparent. It admitted of little ambiguity. But this was not its great strength; on the contrary, it was its great weakness. Popular sovereignty, by contrast, was gloriously ambiguous. At what point would the crucial decision on slavery be taken? There were two principal answers. Some argued that it should be during the territorial phase, perhaps as soon as a territory began to enjoy its (limited) powers of self-government. This doctrine was often described by its enemies as “squatter sovereignty,” though a less opprobrious term might be “territorial sovereignty.” Others rejected this interpretation and claimed that only upon entry into the Union could a decision to outlaw slavery be made. Not surprisingly, the first answer came disproportionately from Northerners, the second from Southerners.

These distinctions, and the policy of popular sovereignty in general, are familiar to historians. Childers’ volume adds detail to our knowledge. He shows, for example, that some of the popular sovereignty advocates blurred the critical distinction, while others at first implied they supported one view only to emerge later as explicit proponents of the other. In the 1840s, the most important exponents of popular sovereignty were Polk’s vice president, George Dallas; Senator Daniel Dickinson of New York; presidential candidate Lewis Cass of Michigan; and, of course, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois (although Douglas briefly flirted with the proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line at 36° 30’). Over the course of the 1850s, Douglas made the doctrine his own.

After discussing the federal government’s...

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