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organization of any Territory of the United States, of either Territorial Government or State Constitution, provided the government so established shall be Republican and in conformity with the Constitution of the United States." This resolution was a practical endorsement of the course of Stephen A. Douglas in supporting the Compromise measures of 1850, which he had defended as being "all founded upon the great principle that every people ought to possess the right to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way," and that "the same principle" should be "extended to all of the Territories of the United States." In accordance with his views and the resolution aforesaid, Mr. Douglas in 1854, as we have already seen, incorporated in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill a clause declaring it to be "the true intent and meaning of the Act not to legislate Slavery into any State or Territory, or to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." His position, as stated by himself, was, substantially that the Lecompton Pro-Slavery Constitution was a fraud upon the people of Kansas, in that it did not embody the will of that people; and he denied the right of Congress to force a Constitution upon an unwilling people --without regard, on his part, to whether that Constitution allowed or prohibited Slavery or any other thing, whether good or bad. He held that the people themselves were the sole judges of whether it is good or bad, and whether desirable or not. The Supreme Court of the United States had in the meantime made a decision in a case afterward known as the "Dred Scott case," which was held back until after the Presidential election of 1856 had taken place, and added fuel to the political fire already raging. Dred Scott was a Negro Slave. His owner voluntarily took him first into a Free State, and afterward into a Territory which came within the Congressional prohibitive legislation aforesaid. That decision in brief was substantially that no Negro Slave imported from Africa, nor his descendant, can be a citizen of any State within the meaning of the Constitution; that neither the Congress nor any Territorial Legislature has under the Constitution of the United States, the power to exclude Slavery from any Territory of the United States; and that it is for th
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