Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/117

 the legal exclusion of slavery from certain Territories in good faith. Even the South—some scheming slavery-propagandists excepted—had acquiesced in it. Why did Douglas advance his disturbing measure? Did he do it, as his friends asserted, because he really thought he could thus put the slavery question to rest? Then he had dreadfully misjudged the character and temper of the American people; for nothing could have been more apt to fan the smouldering embers into a new and furious flame. Did he do it because he believed that so daring a bid for Southern favor as the opening of the Territories to the ingress of slavery was, would open to him an easy road to the presidency? Then he had disastrously miscalculated his chances, for he could not satisfy the greed of the slave-holders for an increase of power without irretrievably forfeiting the favor of the North.

The Dred Scott decision must have made him feel that the two horses he attempted to ride were going in directly opposite directions. That decision declared that Congress had no Constitutional power to prohibit slavery in the Territories and that the slave-holder had, therefore, under the Constitution a right to take his slaves into any Territory and keep them there. The slave-power concluded at once that then the slave-holder was, under the Constitution, entitled to a protection of that right, no matter whether the inhabitants of a Territory liked slavery or not. But what would then become of Douglas's boasted “Popular Sovereignty,” which his adherents in the North tried to make people believe would work to keep slavery out of the Territories?

But this theoretical discussion was not all that pestered the “Little Giant.” The pro-slavery interest attempted to smuggle Kansas into the Union as a Slave State under the notorious Lecompton Constitution, which had been framed by