Jeniffer electronic book

The Republican party was not entirely national,
because it had originated partly in embittered sectional feeling, but it
proclaimed a national idea and a national policy. It insisted on the
responsibility of the national government in relation to the institution
of slavery, and it insisted also that the Union should be preserved. But
before the Republicanism could be recognized as national even in the
North, it was obliged to meet and vanquish one more proposed treatment
of the problem of slavery--founded on an inadequate conception of
democracy. In this case, moreover, the inadequate conception of
democracy was much more traditionally American than was an exclusive
preoccupation either with natural or legal rights; and according to its
chief advocate it would have the magical result of permitting the
expansion of slavery, and of preserving the Constitutional Union,
without doing any harm to democracy.
This was the theory of Popular Sovereignty, whose ablest exponent was
Stephen Douglas. About 1850, he became the official leader of the
Western Democracy.


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