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To some moderates, slavery in the territories was not a matter for Congress to resolve; they argued that the people in each territory, like those in each American state, were the sovereigns thereof and should determine the status of slavery. [11] Popular sovereignty became part of the rhetoric for leaving to residents of the new American ...
Douglas and Pierce hoped that popular sovereignty would help bring an end to the national debate over slavery, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act outraged Northerners. The division between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces caused by the Act was the death knell for the ailing Whig Party, which broke apart after the Act.
Popular sovereignty in its modern sense is an idea that dates to the social contract school represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau authored a book titled The Social Contract, a prominent political work that highlighted the idea of the "general will".
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 called for popular sovereignty: the decision about slavery would be made by popular vote of the territory's settlers rather than by legislators in Washington, D.C. Existing sectional tensions surrounding slavery quickly found focus in Kansas. [5] [6]
According to historian Mark Stegmaier, "The Fugitive Slave Act, the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, the admission of California as a free state, and even the application of the formula of popular sovereignty to the territories were all less important than the least remembered component of the Compromise of 1850—the ...
[46] Per Lynn, the core principles of Jacksonism were white supremacy, the perpetuation of slavery, the ethnic cleansing of unceded Indigenous land claims within the territory of the United States, and mass politics, all guided by the worldview that "white men surrendered their sovereignty in proportion to its exercise by people of color."
Douglas had long advocated popular sovereignty, under which the settlers in each new territory would decide their own status as a slave or free state; he had repeatedly asserted that the proper application of popular sovereignty would prevent slavery-induced conflict and would allow Northern and Southern states to resume their peaceful coexistence.
There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to their owner. Enforcement of these ...