124 EMPLOYMENT OF THE PLEBISCITE ^422 



be made to the doctrine of popular or squatter sovereignty. 

 The essence of the doctrine is found in a letter of Lewis 

 Cass, of December 24, 1847, in which the writer " asserts 

 that the principle of the Wilmot proviso ' should be kept 

 out of the national legislature, and left to the people of the 

 confederacy in their respective local governments ' ; and 

 that, as to the territories themselves, the people inhabiting 

 them should be left ' to regulate their internal concerns in 

 their own way.' " The advocates of this theory, among 

 them Stephen A. Douglas, " generally accepted the terri- 

 torial section of the Constitution ... as applicable, not 

 only to the territory possessed by the United States in 1788, 

 but prospectively to any which might be acquired there- 

 after." Thus they held "that Congress might make any 

 * rules and regulations ' it might deem proper for the terri- 

 tories, including the Mexican acquisition ; but that, in mak- 

 ing these rules and regulations, it was wiser and better for 

 Congress to allow the ' inchoate state ' to shape its own des- 

 tiny at its own will. Properly . . . there was nothing in 

 the dogma which could constitutionally prohibit Congress 

 from making rules for or against slavery in the territories, 

 if it should so determine, though gradually Douglas and 

 some of its more enthusiastic advocates grew into the belief 

 that popular sovereignty was the constitutional right of the 

 people of the territories, which Congress could not abridge." 

 After the new Republican Party had gained control of the 

 House of Representatives in 1 855-1 857, the South came to 

 the realization that "if a democratic Congress might make 

 a ' regulation ' empowering the people of the territories to 

 control slavery therein, a Congress of opposite views might 

 with equal justice make a ' regulation ' of its own, abolish- 

 ing slavery therein." As a result " the whole South came to 

 repudiate popular sovereignty and the territorial section of 

 the Constitution, and rested on the Calhoun doctrine that 

 Congress and the immigrant both entered the territory with 

 all the limitations of the Constitution upon them, including 



