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Updated: June 1, 2025
The peculiar availability of this well-known Democrat consisted in his having been on a foreign mission when the Kansas-Nebraska bill was under fire. Still, Buchanan was reported "sound" on the essential features of this measure. Before the national convention met, a well-organized movement was under way to secure the nomination of the Pennsylvanian.
"See the magnificent forts he permitted Davis to build up in the South, the arsenals he let him stock. The country does not realize this. But the day will, come when they will execrate Pierce before Benedict Arnold, sir. And look at the infamous Kansas-Nebraska act! That is the greatest crime, and Douglas and Pierce the greatest criminals, of the century."
And now the chance had come, and he hit "that thing" hard. In 1858 he challenged Douglas, the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, to go round the country with him and make speeches on the great subject of the day: Douglas to take one side of the question and Lincoln the other. It was a bold thing to do, for Douglas was considered the greatest speaker of the time, and Lincoln was scarcely known.
The campaign had already been waging since the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. It now became intense. Douglas gave Buchanan his loyal support, and the great Southern planters united with New York merchants and New England conservatives to make the Democratic ticket successful. Even Edward Everett and Rufus Choate made public announcement of their conversion to Democracy.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise and providing for "squatter sovereignty" in the territories in question, outraged the North and led immediately to the forming of the Republican party. It was not long before public sentiment began to make itself felt, and the first demonstration took place in Boston.
Pennsylvania elected to Congress twenty-one pronounced opponents of popular sovereignty and slavery extension. Ohio and Indiana had both cast their votes for Pierce. But at this election Ohio rejected the revised Democratic platform by 75,00 and Indiana by 13,000. After his rebuff in Chicago he plunged into the Illinois campaign, which was fought on the Kansas-Nebraska issue.
The Democratic platform of 1856 endorsed the doctrine of popular sovereignty as embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska legislation, which implied that Congress should neither prohibit nor introduce slavery into the Territories, but should leave the inhabitants free to decide that question for themselves, the public domains being open to slaveowners on equal terms with others.
Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill brought on an era of civil war in Kansas, sent the guerrillas over the Sunflower State, burned Lawrence, destroyed the State government and filled the whole land with tumult and bitterness. And it cost Douglas his fame and place among the great men of the Republic.
Having occasion to visit Springfield one day while the subject of the selection of a candidate was under consideration among the opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, I encountered Mr. Lincoln on the street.
Whenever you shall have blotted out the State Sovereignties, abolished the State Legislatures, and consolidated all the power in the Federal Government, you will have established a Consolidated Empire as destructive to the Liberties of the People and the Rights of the Citizen as that of Austria, or Russia, or any other despotism that rests upon the neck of the People. * There is but one possible way in which Slavery can be abolished, and that is by leaving a State, according to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, perfectly free to form and regulate its institutions in its own way.
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