The Meaning of the Gettysburg Address

[Thomas Thorne]

The relevant text of the Kansas-Nebraska Act is as follows:

""When admitted as a State or States,They shall be received into the Union with or without slavery as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission."

All the history I have read concerning the coming of the Civil War has told me that Kansas-Nebraska abandoned Congressional decision making on whether or not slavery could exist in these areas. The people of the Kansas and Nebraska territories were granted the power to make this crucial decision as part of the constitutions they wrote prior to their admission to the Union.

This is the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty" whose most famous champion was Stephen Douglas, the Senate floor manager for the bill. Alexander Stephens, the House floor manager & future Confederate VP also championed the idea that settlers could decide the fate of slavery before a territory became a state. In 1857 Dred Scott declared the tenets of Douglas and Stephens unconstitutional.

I plan on reading the debates about Kansas-Nebraska in the Congressional Globe. I want to see how many Southern Congressmen and Senators in 1854 agreed with Alexander Stephens about Popular Sovereignty and how many agreed with the idea of the extraterritoriality of slavery later enunciated by Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott.
Tom