of search on the high seas. He ardently supported the policy
of making Federal appropriations (of land, but not of money) for
internal improvements of a national character, being a prominent
advocate of the construction, by government aid, of a trans-continental
railway, and the chief promoter (1850) of the Illinois Central; in 1854
he suggested that Congress should impose tonnage duties from which towns
and cities might themselves pay for harbour improvement, &c. To him as
chairman of the committee on territories, at first in the House, and
then in the Senate, of which he became a member in December 1847, it
fell to introduce the bills for admitting Texas, Florida, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Oregon into the Union, and for
organizing the territories of Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah,
Washington, Kansas and Nebraska. In 1848 he introduced a bill proposing
that all the territory acquired from Mexico should be admitted into the
Union as a single state, and upon the defeat of this bill proposed
others providing for the immediate admission of parts of this territory.

In the bitter debates concerning the keenly disputed question of the
permission of slavery in the territories, Douglas was particularly
prominent. Against slavery itself he seems never to have had any moral
antipathy; he married (1847) the daughter[1] of a slaveholder, Colonel
Robert Martin of North Carolina, and a cousin of Douglas's colleague in
Congress, D. S. Reid; and his wife and children were by inheritance the
owners of slaves, though he himself never was. He did more probably than
any other one man, except Henry Clay, to secure the adoption of the
Compromise Measures of 1850. In 1849 the Illinois legislature demanded
that its representatives and senators should vote for the prohibition of
slavery in the Mexican cession, but next year this sentiment in Illinois
had grown much weaker, and, both there and in Congress, Douglas's name
was soon to become identified with the so-called "popular sovereignty"
or "squatter sovereignty" theory, previously enunciated by Lewis Cass,
by which each territory was to be left to decide for itself whether it
should or should not have slavery. In 1850 his power of specious
argument won back to him his Chicago constituents who had violently
attacked him for not opposing the Fugitive Slave Law.

The bill for organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which
Douglas reported in January 1854 and whi