cording to the terms of the Missouri Compromise. But with the aid of northern doughfaces the South might hope to obtain the repeal of that celebrated compact; and now once more its wishes were gratified, so far as mere legislation could go; but it soon became apparent that it was only sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind. The needed northern leader was found in Stephen Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, who hoped to become President. He maintained that the compromise of 1850, by leaving the slavery question undetermined in New Mexico and Utah, had virtually repealed the Missouri Compromise, and made it necessary to leave that question undetermined in the Kansas-Nebraska territory. There was no strict logic in this doctrine; for KansasNebraska, being part of the Louisiana purchase, was covered by the Missouri Compromise, whereas New Mexico-Utah lay wholly outside the area contemplated in that agreement. But in the stress of political emergencies, it is apt to fare ill with strict logic. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed, reopening the slavery question in the lands west of Missouri and Iowa. This was substantially a repeal of the Missouri Compromise. It was a great and alarming concession to the slave power. Douglas and his followers intended it to ensure peace, but its immediate consequence was the great Civil War.

For according to Douglas' doctrine, which was known as "squatter sovereignty," it was now to be left to the settlers in Kansas and Nebraska whether they would have slavery or not. It was a plausible doctrine, because it appealed to that strong love of local self-government which has always been one of the soundest political instincts of the American people. But its practical result was to create a furious rivalry between North and South, as to which should get settlers enough into Kansas to secure a majority of popular votes there. The issue, thus clearly defined, at once wrought a new division between political parties. In the autumn of 1854 all the northern men who were opposed to the extension of slavery, whatever their former party names might have been, combined together under the name of "Anti-Nebraska Men," and succeeded in electing a majority of the House of Representatives.

Soon afterward they took the name of Republicans, and because of their alleged fondness for negroes, their scornful opponents called them "Black Republicans."

The Struggle for Kansas.—The course of westward migration now became determined by political reasons. Anti-slavery societies subscribed money to hasten immigration into Kansas, while Missouri and Arkansas poured in a gang of border ruffians, to make life insecure for northern immigrants and deter them from coming. The plains of Kansas soon became the scene of wholesale robbery and murder. The preliminary phase of the Civil War had begun. A state of war existed in Kansas till 1858, when the tide of northern immigration had become so strong as to sweep away all obstacles and to decide that slavery should be forbidden there. Meanwhile the debates in Congress had grown so fierce as to end in personal violence. In 1856 Charles Sumner made a speech which exasperated the slave-holders; and shortly afterward, Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, sought out Sumner while he was writing at his desk in the senate-chamber, and beat him over the head with a stout cane until he had nearly killed him. An attempt was made to have Brooks expelled from Congress, but it failed of the requisite two-thirds vote. Brooks then resigned his seat and appealed to his constituents, who re-elected him to Congress by an almost unanimous vote, while many southern newspapers loudly applauded his conduct.

Dred Scott. In the presidential campaign of 1856, the Democrats nominated a northern doughface, James Buchanan, and endorsed the principle of squatter sovereignty; the Republicans nominated the western explorer Fremont, and asserted the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories, thus planting themselves upon the ground of the Wilmot Proviso. A small remnant of doughface Whigs nominated Fillmore, and tried to turn attention away from the great question at issue, by protesting against the too hasty naturalization of foreign-born citizens. Buchanan obtained 174 electoral votes, Fremont 114, and Fillmore 8. The large Republican vote showed that the northern people were at last awakening to the danger, and it astonished and alarmed

the South. The secessionist feeling was diligently encouraged by southern leaders who had political ends to subserve by it. The slave power became more aggressive than ever. The renewal of the African slave trade, which had been forbidden since 1808, was demanded, and without waiting for the question to be settled, the infamous traffic was resumed on a considerable scale, and with scarcely any attempt at concealment. In the summer and autumn of 1857, the English fleet which watched the African coast, charged with the duty of suppressing the slave trade, captured twenty-two vessels engaged in this business, and all but one of these were American. By 1860 the trade had assumed large proportions, and was openly advertised in the southern newspapers. Not satisfied with this, the slave-holders strove to enlist the power of the Federal government in actively protecting their baneful institution. The principle of squatter sovereignty had not served their purpose, for they could not compete with the North in sending settlers to Kansas, and in the struggle there they were already getting worsted. They accordingly threw squatter sovereignty to the winds, and demanded that the Federal government should protect slavery in all the territories. The question was brought to the test in a case which was decided in the Supreme Court in 1857. Dred Scott, a slave who had been taken by his owner from Missouri into free territory, brought suit to obtain his freedom. Of the nine judges of the Supreme Court, five were slave-holders, and some of the others were doughfaces. When the case was at last brought before them, it was decided that, according to the Constitution, slaves were not persons but property, and that slave-owners could migrate from one part of the Union to another and take their negroes with them, just as they could take their horses and cows, or the banknotes in their waistcoat pockets. Two of the judges, Benjamin Curtis, of Massachusetts, and John dissenting opinions.

McLean, of Ohio, delivered

The Crisis. The revival of the African slave trade attracted little notice at the time, in comparison with the Dred Scott decision. The effect of the two, taken together, would have been to drown the whole Union in a deluge of barbarism, to blight the

growth of the American people both materially and morally, and to make us a nuisance in the eyes of the civilized world. The northern people refused to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court, and the northern Democrats, led by Douglas, became unwilling to co-operate any longer with the Democrats of the South. Some of them drifted into the Republican party, others tried to maintain the already effete principle of squatter sovereignty; but nearly all were driven to the unwelcome conclusion that the day of compromises was gone. Thus North and South were at last definitely arrayed against each other, and the air was full of dismal forebodings of war. In the autumn of 1859 a blow was struck, slight enough in itself, but prophetic of the coming storm. John Brown, a Connecticut man of the old Puritan type, had been an anti-slavery leader in the Kansas fights. Now with fanatical fervor he made up his mind to inaugurate a crusade against the slave power. With a handful of followers he attacked the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, in the hope of getting arms and setting up in the wild mountains of that neighborhood an asylum for fugitive slaves. He was, of course, captured and put to death, but his daring act sounded the key-note of the approaching conflict. For that very reason he got at the moment but little sympathy in the North, where the Republican majority, content with the moderate policy of excluding slavery from the territories, were very unwilling to be considered allies of the extreme abolitionists, whom they regarded as disturbers of the peace.

In the presidential election of 1860 there were four candidates. The southern Democrats had separated from the northern Democrats, the Whig doughfaces were not yet extinct, and the Republicans were daily waxing in strength. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, and declared that the Federal government must forbid slavery in the territories. The southern Democrats nominated John Breckenridge, of Kentucky, and declared that the Federal government must protect slavery in the territories. These two parties had the courage of their conviction; the others shuffled, but in different ways.

The northern Democrats, in nominating Douglas, took their

stand upon a principle, though it was one that had already been proved inadequate; they left the question of slavery in each territory to be decided by the people who should settle in the territory; but in order to catch southern votes, they made a concession similar to that which Clay had made in 1844, and vaguely announced themselves as willing to submit to the decision of the Supreme Court. This weakness, in presence of the Dred Scott verdict, gained them no votes at the South, where they could not outbid Breckenridge, and it lost them many votes at the North.

The still surviving remnant of doughface Whigs nominated John Bell, of Tennessee, and declared themselves in favor of "the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the laws," a phrase which might mean almost anything. These good people were so afraid of war, that they would fain keep the peace by shutting their eyes and persuading themselves that the terrible slavery question did not really exist, and that all would go well if men would only be good and kind to one another.

In the electoral college Lincoln obtained 180 votes, Breckenridge 72, Bell 39, and Douglas 12. The popular vote for Douglas was very large, but it was not so distributed as to gain a majority in any state except Missouri; beside the nine electoral votes of that state he obtained three in New Jersey. The result of the election was a decisive victory for the Republicans. Its significance was far-reaching. It not only meant the overthrow of the Dred Scott doctrine and the squatter sovereignty doctrine, but it even went back of the Missouri Compromise doctrine, and put an immediate stop to the extension of slavery into the territories. It said not a word about the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, but it meant that hereafter free labor was to have enormous room for expansion, while slave labor was to have none.

The North and the South in 1860. The year of Lincoln's election was the census year in which the population of the United States first showed itself greater than that of its mother country.