This was the theory of Popular Sovereignty, whose ablest exponent was Stephen Douglas.  About 1850, he became the official leader of the Western Democracy.  This section of the party no longer controlled the organization as it did in the days of Jackson; but it was still powerful and influential.  It persisted in its loyalty to the Union coupled with its dislike of nationalizing organization; and it persisted, also, in its dislike of any interference with the individual so long as he was making lawful money.  The legal right to own slaves was from their point of view a right like another; and not only could it not be taken away from the Southern states, but no individual should be deprived of it by the national government.  When a state came to be organized, such a right might be denied by the state constitution; but the nation should do nothing to prejudice the decision.  The inhabitants of the national domain should be allowed to own slaves or not to own them, just as they pleased, until the time came for the adoption of a state constitution; and any interference with this right violated democratic principles by an unjustifiable restriction upon individual and local action.  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.  It was, after all, the first attempt which had been made to legislate in relation to slavery on the basis of a principle, and the application of any honest idea to the subject-matter of the controversy served to clear an atmosphere which for thirty years had been clouded by unprincipled compromises.  The methods and the objects of the several different parties were made suddenly definite and unmistakable; and their representatives found it necessary for the first time to stand firmly upon their convictions instead of sacrificing them in order to maintain an appearance of peace.  It soon became apparent that not even this erection of national irresponsibility into a principle