It was precisely at this time, when the Illinois legislature was instructing him to reverse his attitude toward the Wilmot Proviso, that Senator Douglas began to change his policy.  Believing that the combination against him in the legislature was largely accidental and momentary, he refused to resign.[321] Events amply justified his course; but the crisis was not without its lessons for him.  The futility of a compromise based on an extension of the Missouri Compromise line was now apparent.  Opposition to the extension of slavery was too strong; and belief in the free status of the acquired territory too firmly rooted in the minds of his constituents.  There remained the possibility of reintegrating the Democratic party through the application of the principle of “squatter sovereignty,” Was it possible to offset the anti-slavery sentiment of his Northern constituents by an insistent appeal to their belief in local self-government?

The taproot from which squatter sovereignty grew and flourished, was the instinctive attachment of the Western American to local government; or to put the matter conversely, his dislike of external authority.  So far back as the era of the Revolution, intense individualism, bold initiative, strong dislike of authority, elemental jealousy of the fruits of labor, and passionate attachment to the soil that has been cleared for a home, are qualities found in varying intensity among the colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia.  Nowhere, however, were they so marked as along the Western border, where centrifugal forces were particularly strong and local attachments were abnormally developed.  Under stress of real or fancied wrongs, it was natural for settlers in these frontier regions to meet for joint protest, or if the occasion were grave enough, to enter into political association, to resist encroachment upon what they felt to be their natural rights.  Whenever they felt called upon to justify their course, they did so in language that repeated, consciously or unconsciously, the theory of the social contract, with which the political thought of the age was surcharged.  In these frontier communities was born the political habit that manifested itself on successive frontiers of American advance across the continent, and that finally in the course of the slavery controversy found apt expression in the doctrine of squatter sovereignty.[322]

None of the Territories carved out of the original Northwest had shown greater eagerness for separate government than Illinois.  The isolation of the original settlements grouped along the Mississippi, their remoteness from the seat of territorial government on the Wabash, and the consequent difficulty of obtaining legal protection and efficient government, predisposed the people of Illinois to demand a territorial government of their own, long before Congress listened to their memorials.  Bitter controversy and even bloodshed attended their efforts.[323]