Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/381

Rh State, despite all the sophistical doctrines and sanguinary measures of the South to make it a slave State, exercised a potent influence upon subsequent political forces and events in the then-near future.

It is interesting to note the facility with which the statesmanship of a section of the country adapted its convictions to changed conditions. When it was found that the doctrine of popular sovereignty (first, I think, invented by General Cass and afterward adopted by Stephen A. Douglas) failed to make Kansas a slave State, and could not be safely trusted in other emergencies, Southern statesmen promptly abandoned and reprobated that doctrine, and took what they considered firmer ground. They lost faith in the rights, powers, and wisdom of the people and took refuge in the Constitution. Henceforth the favorite doctrine of the South was that the people of a territory had no voice in the matter of slavery whatever; and that the Constitution of the United States, of its own force and effect, carried slavery safely into any territory of the United States and protected the system there until it ceased to be a territory and became a State. The practical operation of this doctrine would be to make all the future new States slaveholding States, for slavery once planted and nursed for years in a territory would easily strengthen itself against the evil day and defy eradication. This doctrine was in some sense supported by Chief-Justice Taney in the infamous Dred Scott decision. This new ground, however, was destined to bring misfortune to its inventors, for it divided for a time the Democratic party, one faction of it going with John C. Breckenridge and the other espousing the cause of Stephen A. Douglas; the one held firmly to the doctrine that the United States Constitution, without any legislation, territorial, national, or otherwise, by its own force and effect, carried slavery into all the territories of the