Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
Popular sovereignty is the principle that the leaders of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy. Popular sovereignty, being a principle, does not imply any particular political implementation.
In 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act reversed long-standing compromises by providing that each new state of the Union would decide its posture on slavery (popular sovereignty). The newly formed Republican Party stood against the expansion of slavery and won control of most Northern states (with enough electoral votes to win the presidency in 1860).
Popular rule, or what he would later call popular sovereignty, lay at the base of his political structure. Like most Jacksonians, Douglas believed that the people spoke through the majority, that the majority will was the expression of the popular will.
If slavery should cease tomorrow, this great aim would still remain." The destruction of the Slave Power thus appeared as at once the most immediate and practical means of stopping the spread of slavery nationally, a politically useful argument for recruiting new voters to the antislavery cause, and a desirable object in its own right. [73] [74]
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 ...
Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan proposes letting the people of a territory vote on whether to permit slavery in the territory. This theory of popular sovereignty would be further endorsed and advocated by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois in the mid-1850s. [147] 1848
This doctrine became known as popular sovereignty. Organized groups from the North sent thousands of abolitionist supporters to Kansas in an attempt to tip the balance in favor of free state advocates, to counter settlement from pro-slavery supporters from Missouri. As a result, pro- and antislavery groups had frequent clashes culminating in ...