Thus was
another kind of liberty invoked in order to meet the new phase of the
crisis; and if it had prevailed, the United States would have become a
legal union without national cohesion, and a democracy which issued, not
illogically, in human servitude.
Douglas was sincere in his belief that the principle of local or Popular
Sovereignty supplied a strictly democratic solution of the slavery
problem, and it was natural that he should seek to use this principle
for the purpose of reaching a permanent settlement. When with the
assistance of the South he effected the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, he honestly thought that he was replacing an arbitrary and
unstable territorial division of the country into slave and free
states, by a settlement which would be stable, because it was the
logical product of the American democratic idea. The interpretation of
democracy which dictated the proposed solution was sufficiently
perverted; but it was nevertheless a faithful reflection of the
traditional point of view of the Jacksonian Democratic party, and it
deserves more respectful historical treatment than it sometimes
receives.
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