In
his first message he complacently congratulated the country that the
slavery question had been settled peacefully and forever by the
compromise measures of 1850. He little knew how ineffective were those
compromises; he never dreamed that it was a question that no compromise
could settle permanently, and probably had no conception of the new
force that was to be given to it during his own term of office. Stephen
A. Douglas, an acknowledged aspirant to the Presidency, being Chairman
of the Senate Committee on Territories, introduced and carried through
Congress a measure called the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which, in providing
for the admission of those Territories as States, embodied his doctrine
of "Popular Sovereignty" in that it permitted the inhabitants to
determine by popular vote whether they should come into the Union as
free States or as slave States, and abolished the Missouri Compromise,
which for thirty-four years had forbidden the acquisition of any slave
territory north of the parallel of 36 deg.
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