Had there been nothing further to consider, the invasion of the Senate by Big Business in the ’fifties might not have taken place.  But there was something else.  Slavery’s system of agriculture was excessively wasteful.  To be highly profitable it required virgin soil, and the financial alliance demanded high profits.  Early in the ’fifties, the problem of Big Business was the acquisition of fresh soil for slavery.  The problem entered politics with the question how could this be brought about without appearing to contradict democracy?  The West also had its incipient Big Business.  It hinged upon railways.  Now that California had been acquired, with a steady stream of migration westward, with all America dazzled more or less by gold-mines and Pacific trade, a transcontinental railway was a Western dream.  But what course should it take, what favored regions were to become its immediate beneficiaries?  Here was a chance for great jockeying among business interests in Congress, for slave-holders, money-lenders, railway promoters to manipulate deals to their hearts’ content.  They had been doing so amid a high complication of squabbling, while Douglas was traveling in Europe during 1853.  When he returned late in the year, the unity of the Democratic machine in Congress was endangered by these disputes.  Douglas at once attacked the problem of party harmony.  He threw himself into the task with all his characteristic quickness, all his energy and resourcefulness.

By this time the problem contained five distinct factors:  The upper Northeast wanted a railroad starting at Chicago.  The Central West wanted a road from St. Louis.  The Southwest wanted a road from New Orleans, or at least, the frustration of the two Northern schemes.  Big Business wanted new soil for slavery.  The Compromise of 1850 stood in the way of the extension of slave territory.

If Douglas had had any serious convictions opposed to slavery the last of the five factors would have brought him to a standstill.  Fortunately for him as a party strategist, he was indifferent.  Then, too, he firmly believed that slavery could never thrive in the West because of climatic conditions.  “Man might propose, but physical geography would dispose."(1) On both counts it seemed to him immaterial what concessions be made to slavery extension northwestward.  Therefore, he dismissed this consideration and applied himself to the harmonization of the four business factors involved.  The result was a famous compromise inside a party.  His Kansas-Nebraska Bill created two new territories, one lying westward from Chicago; one lying westward from St. Louis.  It also repealed the Missouri Compromise and gave the inhabitants of each territory the right to decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be permitted in their midst.  That is to say, both to the railway promoter and the slavery financier, it extended equal governmental protection, but it promised favors to none, and left each faction to rise or fall in the free competition of private enterprise.  Why—­was not this, remembering Douglas’s assumptions, a master-stroke?