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Not all at once, but gradually, a politically self-sufficient entity would come into being. Such had been the history of American colonization; it seemed the part of wise statesmanship to follow the trend of that history. Theoretically popular sovereignty, as applied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was not an advance over the doctrine of Cass and Dickinson.
We have been robbed of the rights guaranteed to us by the Kansas-Nebraska bill. We have been robbed of the rights of American citizens. We have been given the alternative of abject and degrading submission or of extermination. And now we make our answer. We will return blow for blow, wound for wound, stripe for stripe, and burning for burning.
It may here be remarked that while Mr. Douglas held that "So far as the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty and Nonintervention is concerned, the Colorado Bill, the Nevada Bill, and the Dakota Bill, are identically the same with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and in its precise language" these former Bills having been passed at the last Session of the 36th Congress the Republicans, on the contrary, held that neither in these nor other measures had they abandoned any distinctive Republican principle; while Breckinridge declared that they had passed those Territorial Bills, without the Wilmot proviso, because they felt perfectly secure in those Territories, with all the Federal patronage in Republican hands.
In the midst of this carnival of ferocity came the Dred Scott decision, cutting under the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, denying to the people of a Territory the right to legislate on slavery, and giving to all slave-holders the right to settle with their slaves anywhere they pleased outside a Free State.
The author of the Kansas-Nebraska bill doubtless anticipated a gradual and natural occupation of the new Territories by settlers like those home-seekers who had taken up government lands in Iowa and other States of the Northwest.
He was the originator of many legislative acts of great importance to the State, among the rest one relating to land titles, known as "Lawrence's Law," and the Ohio Free Banking Law, similar in some respects to the existing National Banking Law. In 1854 he was one of the signers to a call for a State Convention in opposition to the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill."
Petitions poured into Congress, meetings were held to denounce Douglas as a second Benedict Arnold, and he was burned in effigy by thousands who never took the trouble to read the Kansas-Nebraska Bill or seriously contemplated its effects.
It is impossible not to admire Douglas's courage in that trying ordeal. He found the hall filled with his opponents, yet he began by saying, "My fellow citizens, I appear before you to vindicate the Kansas-Nebraska Bill." The words evoked a perfect tumult, which continued for half an hour.
You old Whigs who followed Henry Clay to the end, why do you denounce me when the Kansas-Nebraska bill is the same in principle as Clay's Compromises of 1850 ..." "How about California?" "It was a compromise. And as I have said before if the people of California had wanted a slave state they would have had it, any law to the ..." Voices crying: "Benedict Arnold! Judas!"
Tenth, That in the recent vetoes, by their Federal Governors, of the acts of the Legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting Slavery in those Territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted Democratic principle of Non-Intervention and Popular Sovereignty embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein.
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