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Updated: June 1, 2025
In 1852-3 they commenced the Kansas-Nebraska agitation; and, what with their incessant political and colonizing movements in those Territories; the frequent and dreadful atrocities committed by their tools, the Border-ruffians; the incessant turmoil created by cruelties to their Fugitive-slaves; their persistent efforts to change the Supreme Court to their notions; these-with the decision and opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case together worked the Slavery question up to a dangerous degree of heat, by the year 1858.
I prefer that the conflict shall be between the Federal Government and the lawless. I can see the end of that. The law will triumph and the evil stop." "We who pass this Kansas-Nebraska bill, both at the North and South, intend to maintain its principles. We do not intend to be driven from them by clamor nor by assault.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill had not affected any change in Lincoln's thinking. His steady, consistent development as a political thinker had gone on chiefly in silence ever since his Protest seventeen years before. He was still intolerant of Abolitionism, still resolved to leave slavery to die a natural death in the States where it was established.
It only carried out the Georgia platform protesting against Congressional prohibition of slavery in the Territories. He paid high tribute to Douglas as a patriot and friend to the South. "Whoever condemned Douglas needed watching himself." Mr. Toombs charged that the representatives of the Know-nothing party had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and now claimed ignorance of its provisions.
As to this statement I can only say I may have had in mind instances of such legislation as may be found in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. When we say that the Constitution of its own force, applies to the Territories, we refer to the parts that are applicable to the Territories as distinguishable from the parts that relate to States exclusively. It is a provision of the Constitution that
If this be called dodging, I admit that I dodged, and the gentleman can make the most of it." Mr. Hill declared that the Kansas-Nebraska bill embodied the principles of "squatter sovereignty" and alien suffrage. The bill was not identical with the Utah and New Mexico bill, as Toombs and Stephens had alleged.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill was originally harmless enough, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which on Mr. Davis' insistence was made a part of it, let slip the dogs of war. In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and pliant instrument. Like Clay, Webster and Calhoun before him, Judge Douglas had the presidential bee in his bonnet.
But he only served one term in the House, after which he returned to his law business and seemed for a time to lose interest in politics. But the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill aroused him again. As a boy he had been to New Orleans. There he had seen the slave market. He had seen negro parents parted from their children, and sold to different masters.
When the fight began there were four parties in the field: the Democrats, the Whigs, the Free-Soilers, and the Know-Nothings. The Free-Soil party, hitherto a small organization, had sought to make slavery the main issue in politics. Its watchword was "Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men." It is needless to add that it was instantaneous in its opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles, had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought through, and then fought through, in American and not in European terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser.
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