was an exclusive
preoccupation either with natural or legal rights; and according to its
chief advocate it would have the magical result of permitting the
expansion of slavery, and of preserving the Constitutional Union,
without doing any harm to democracy.

This was the theory of Popular Sovereignty, whose ablest exponent was
Stephen Douglas. About 1850, he became the official leader of the
Western Democracy. This section of the party no longer controlled the
organization as it did in the days of Jackson; but it was still powerful
and influential. It persisted in its loyalty to the Union coupled with
its dislike of nationalizing organization; and it persisted, also, in
its dislike of any interference with the individual so long as he was
making lawful money. The legal right to own slaves was from their point
of view a right like another; and not only could it not be taken away
from the Southern states, but no individual should be deprived of it by
the national government. When a state came to be organized, such a right
might be denied by the state constitution; but the nation should do
nothing to prejudice the decision. The inhabitants of the national
domain should be allowed to own slaves or not to own them, just as they
pleased, until the time came for the adoption of a state constitution;
and any interference with this right violated democratic principles by
an unjustifiable restriction upon individual and local action. Thus was
another kind of liberty invoked in order to meet the new phase of the
crisis; and if it had prevailed, the United States would have become a
legal union without national cohesion, and a democracy which issued, not
illogically, in human servitude.

Douglas was sincere in his belief that the principle of local or Popular
Sovereignty supplied a strictly democratic solution of the slavery
problem, and it was natural that he should seek to use this principle
for the purpose of reaching a permanent settlement. When with the
assistance of the South he effected the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, he honestly thought that he was replacing an arbitrary and
unstable territorial division of the country into slave and free
states, by a settlement which would be stable, because it was the
logical product of the American democratic idea. The interpretation of
democracy which dictated the proposed solution was sufficiently
perverted; but it was nevertheless a faithful reflection of the
traditional poin