Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/190



182 DOROTHY HULL

outbreak of the Civil War" was introduced in that body the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. 1

The storm raised by the passage of the bill was never to die away until slavery itself should be crushed. As Charles Sumner said in speaking of the act: "To every man in the land it says with clear, penetrating voice 'Are you for freedom, or are you for slavery ?' " Not only did the Free-Soilers and many of the Whigs denounce the Act, but many members of the Democratic Party refused to follow their leaders in support- ing it. In a document entitled the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" the bill was stigmatized as "A gross violation of a sacred pledge (the Missouri Compromise) ; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights ; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World, and free laborers from our own states, and to convert it into a dreary region of despotism peopled by masters and slaves." 2 The great Democratic Party was near- ing the rocks on which it was finally to founder.

The doctrine of Popular Sovereignty enunciated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act was one that from its very nature ap- pealed to the people of Oregon, with their virile Western con- fidence in the ability of the people of a locality to manage their own affairs, and yet in the beginning there seems to have been little unanimity of opinion with regard to the bill.

Despite the dominance of the Democratic Party there were in Oregon great numbers of thinking people who opposed the farther extension of slave territory, and viewed with alarm the aggressive attitude of the Southern Democrats who were dictat- ing the policies of the national Democratic Party. 3 In 1855 the first convention of Free-Soilers was held in Oregon, and the movement inaugurated which led to the formation of the Republican Party of Oregon. There appeared, too, a visible defection in the Democratic ranks, though this was due to local rather than to national disputes.

1 Printed in American History Leaflets, No. 17.

2 Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, I, 490.

3 Bancroft, History of Oregon, II, 358.