and more accurately known as
"squatter sovereignty." Its character has already been concisely stated
in the preceding chapter. Its origin is generally attributed to General
Cass, who is supposed to have suggested it in some general expressions
of his celebrated "Nicholson letter," written in December, 1847. On the
16th and 17th of May, 1860, it became necessary for me in a debate, in
the Senate, to review that letter of Mr. Cass. From my remarks then
made, the following extract is taken:

"The Senator [Mr. Douglas] might have remembered, if he had
chosen to recollect so unimportant a thing, that I once had to
explain to him, ten years ago, the fact that I repudiated the
doctrine of that letter at the time it was published, and that
the Democracy of Mississippi had well-nigh crucified me for the
construction which I placed upon it. There were men mean enough
to suspect that the construction I gave to the Nicholson letter
was prompted by the confidence and affection I felt for General
Taylor. At a subsequent period, however, Mr. Cass thoroughly
reviewed it. He uttered (for him) very harsh language against
all who had doubted the true construction of his letter, and he
construed it just as I had done during the canvass of 1848. It
remains only to add that I supported Mr. Cass, not because of
the doctrine of the Nicholson letter, but in despite of it;
because I believed a Democratic President, with a Democratic
Cabinet and Democratic counselors in the two Houses of Congress,
and he as honest a man as I believed Mr. Cass to be, would be a
safer reliance than his opponent, who personally possessed my
confidence as much as any man living, but who was of, and must
draw his advisers from, a party the tenets of which I believed
to be opposed to the interests of the country, as they were to
all my political convictions.

"I little thought at that time that my advocacy of Mr. Cass upon
such grounds as these, or his support by the State of which I am
a citizen, would at any future day be quoted as an endorsement
of the opinions contained in the Nicholson letter, as those
opinions were afterward defined. But it is not only upon this
letter, but equally upon the resolutions of the Convention as
constructive of that letter, that the Senator rested his
argument. [I will here say to the Senator that, if at any time I