slavery.  That was mistaking power for right.  “What I want to know is, whether you will interpose against power and in favor of right....  If the Territorial Legislature refuses to act, will you act?...  If it pass laws hostile to slavery, will you annul them, and substitute laws favoring slavery in their stead?” “What I and my people ask is action; positive, unqualified action.  Our understanding of the doctrine of non-intervention was, that you were not to intervene against us, but I never understood that we could have any compromise or understanding here which could release Congress from an obligation imposed on it by the Constitution of the United States."[783]

Reluctant as Douglas must have been to accentuate the differences between himself and the Southern Democrats, he could not remain silent, for silence would be misconstrued.  With all the tact which he could muster out of a not too abundant store, he sought to conciliate, without yielding his own opinions.  It was a futile effort.  At the very outset he was forced to deny the right of slave property to other protection than common property.  Thence he passed with wider and wider divergence from the Southern position over the familiar ground of popular sovereignty.  To the specific demands which Brown had voiced, he replied that Congress had never passed an act creating a criminal code for any organized Territory, nor any law protecting any species of property.  Congress had left these matters to the territorial legislatures.  Why, then, make an exception of slave property?  The Supreme Court had made no such distinction.  “I know,” said Douglas, in a tone little calculated to soothe the feelings of his opponents, “I know that some gentlemen do not like the doctrine of non-intervention as well as they once did.  It is now becoming fashionable to talk sneeringly of ‘your doctrine of non-intervention,’ Sir, that doctrine has been a fundamental article in the Democratic creed for years.”  “If you repudiate the doctrine of non-intervention and form a slave code by act of Congress, when the people of a Territory refuse it, you must step off the Democratic platform....  I tell you, gentlemen of the South, in all candor, I do not believe a Democratic candidate can ever carry any one Democratic State of the North on the platform that it is the duty of the Federal government to force the people of a Territory to have slavery when they do not want it."[784]

What Brown had asserted with his wonted impulsiveness, was then reaffirmed more soberly by his colleague, Jefferson Davis, upon whom more than any other Southerner the mantle of Calhoun had fallen.  State sovereignty was also his major premise.  The Constitution was a compact.  The Territories were common property of the States.  The territorial legislatures were mere instruments through which the Congress of the United States “executed its trust in relation to the Territories.”  If, as the Senator from Illinois insisted, Congress had granted full