ch in amended form was signed by
the president on the 30th of May, reopened the whole slavery
dispute--wantonly, his enemies charged, for the purpose of securing
Southern support,--and caused great popular excitement, as it repealed
the Missouri Compromise, and declared the people of "any state or
territory" "free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in
their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."
The passage of this Kansas-Nebraska Bill, one of the most momentous in
its consequences ever passed by the Federal Congress, was largely a
personal triumph for Douglas, who showed marvellous energy, adroitness
and resourcefulness, and a genius for leadership. There was great
indignation throughout the free states; and even in Chicago Douglas was
unable to win for himself a hearing before a public meeting. In 1852,
and again in 1856, he was a candidate for the presidential nomination in
the national Democratic convention, and though on both occasions he was
unsuccessful, he received strong support. In 1857 he broke with
President Buchanan and the "administration" Democrats and lost much of
his prestige in the South, but partially restored himself to favour in
the North, and especially in Illinois, by his vigorous opposition to the
method of voting on the Lecompton constitution, which he maintained to
be fraudulent, and (in 1858) to the admission of Kansas into the Union
under this constitution. In 1858, when the Supreme Court, after the vote
of Kansas against the Lecompton constitution, had decided that Kansas
was a "slave" territory, thus quashing Douglas's theory of "popular
sovereignty," he engaged in Illinois in a close and very exciting
contest for the senatorship with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican
candidate, whom he met in a series of debates (at Ottawa, Freeport,
Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton), in one of which,
that at Freeport, Douglas was led to declare that any territory, by
"unfriendly legislation," could exclude slavery, no matter what the
action of the Supreme Court. This, the famous "Freeport Doctrine," lost
to Douglas the support of a large element of his party in the South, and
in Illinois his followers did not poll so large a vote as Lincoln's.
Douglas, however, won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54
to 46. In the Senate he was not reappointed chairman of the committee on
territories. In 1860 in the Democratic national convention in Char