ate, in presence of my father [Henry Dodge of Wisconsin] who will attest its truth -- that I have performed and do perform when at home, all of those menial services to which that senator referred in terms so grating to my feelings. As a general thing I saw my own wood, do all my own marketing. I never had a servant of any color to wait upon me a day in my life. I have driven teams, horses, mules and oxen, and considered myself as respectable then as I do now, or as any senator upon this floor is.⁵⁴

   This incident serves also to illustrate the great change in customs and manners which has taken place in the short time since the birth of our commonwealth. This Cincinnatus -- foreman of the founders of Nebraska -- was yet of courtly manners, a senator of the United States, and minister to the court of Spain.
   When, at last, the Kansas-Nebraska bill involved a question of vital importance to the Democratic party, Douglas, as the conceded and imperious leader of the party, overshadowed all others. But from first to last Dodge coöperated with Douglas for the organization of Nebraska. He showed that he consistently supported the popular sovereignty principle of the Nebraska measure by showing that he had advocated that principle as a solution of the still vexed slavery question in his support of the compromise measures of 1850.⁵⁵
   Senator Dodge discloses Clearly his reasons for desiring the division of the territory:

   Originally I favored the organization of one territory; but representations from our constituents, and a more critical examination of the subject --having an eye to the systems of internal improvement which must be applied by the people of Nebraska and Kansas to develop their resources -- satisfied my colleague who was a member of the committee that reported this bill, and myself, that the great interests of the whole country, and especially of my state demanded that we should support the proposition for the establishment of two territories. Otherwise the seat of government and leading thoroughfares must have fallen south of Iowa.⁵⁶
   Though Bernhart Henn,⁵⁷ member of the lower house of Congress, lived at Fairfield, as early as June 11, 1853, he had established a land and warrant broker's office under the firm name of Henn, Williams & Co., at Council Bluffs, the residence or rendezvous of the potent promoters of the territorial organization and of Omaha City.
   In a speech in the House, urging the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, he discloses the objects and motives of the promoters even more clearly than Senator Dodge had done. "The bill is of more practical importance to the state of Iowa, and the people of the district I represent than to any other state or constituency in the union."⁵⁸
   In answer to "the unjust charge made on this floor by several that it was the scheme of southern men, whereby one of the states to be formed out of these territories was to be a slave state" he demands: "Do they not know that the delegates sent here by the people interested in the organization of that country proposed this division?" ⁵⁹
   Continuing in the same strain he urges that the 40th parallel, the proposed line of division, is nearly on a line dividing the waters of the Platte and the Kansas rivers:

   A line which nature has run for the boundary of states; a line that will insure to each territory a common interest, each having a rich and fertile valley for its commercial center; a line that will be of immense importance to the prosperity and commerce of Iowa; a line that will make the commercial and political center of Nebraska on a parallel with the great commercial emporiums of the Atlantic and the harbor of San Francisco . . .
The organization of two territories instead of one has advantages for the north, and for Iowa in particular, which should not be overlooked. It secures in the Platte valley one of the lines of Pacific railways by making it the center of commerce, wealth and trade. It brings to the country bordering on Iowa the seat of government for Nebraska. It at once opens up a home market for our produce. It places west of us a dense and thriving settlement. It gives to western Iowa a prominence far ahead of that which ten years ago was maintained by the towns in the eastern por-

tion of our state. It brings Iowa nearer to the center of power and commerce.⁶⁰
   While these members of Congress from anti-slavery Iowa thus strongly urged division of the territory, those from pro-slavery Missouri merely acquiesced in the plan. In the Senate Benton opposed the passage of the bill on account of the repeal of the Compromise. Atchison took little part in the debate on the bill, but while he said that he thought slavery would go into Kansas if the Compromise should be repealed,⁶¹ it does not appear that he ever urged division.
   In the House, Lindley, Miller, and Oliver discussed the measure but said nothing about division. Lindley urged that organization must precede settlement, which must precede "that great enterprise of the age, the great Pacific railroad." Miller and Oliver discussed the question of Indian cessions.
   Facts thus rudely obtrude themselves as a substitute for the guessing of the historians as to the primary motive of Douglas for the division scheme, namely, subserviency to the hope and intent of the slave power to make Kansas a slave state, and they seem positively to preclude that theory. On this point there is a strong and significant consensus of northern opinion. Douglas himself expressed his belief that it would be impracticable to fix slavery upon either of the territories. In his noted speech on the 30th of January, 1854, he urged that slaves had actually been kept in the Northwest territory in spite of the prohibition of the ordinance, and that they were then kept in Nebraska in spite of the prohibition of the Missouri Compromise; but the People of all the northern territories had abolished slavery as soon as they had the local authority to do so. And so he said of Nebraska: "When settlers rush in, when labor becomes plenty and therefore cheap, in that climate, with its productions, it is worse than folly to think of its being a slaveholding country. I do not believe there is a man in Congress who thinks it could be permanently a slaveholding country. I have no idea that it could . . . When you give them a legislature you thereby confess that they are competent to exercise the powers of legislation. If they wish slavery they have a right to it. If they do not want it they will not have it, and you should not force it upon them."⁶²
   Benton in his speech in bitter opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill said: "The question of slavery in these territories, if thrown open to a territorial action, will be a question of numbers, a question of the majority for or against slavery; and what chance would the slaveholders have in such a contest? No chance at all. The slave owners will be overwhelmed and compelled to play at a most unequal game, not only in point of numbers but in point of stakes. The slaveholder stakes his property and has to run off or lose it if outvoted at the polls."⁶³
   Benton dreaded and deprecated opening anew the slavery contest by the proposed repeal of the Compromise. For the sake of peace he had promoted the clause in the constitution of Missouri prohibiting the legislature from emancipating slaves without the consent of their owners.
   Senator Dodge insisted that, as touching slavery, the bill would have the effect of freeing several hundred slaves who would be taken into Kansas and Nebraska as domestic servants on the promise of freedom at some fixed time. The owners of slaves, he said, would be too timid and conservative to take them into new and unfavorable communities in larger number.⁶⁴ This theory was peculiarly confirmed in Nebraska, and doubtless would have been in Kansas after conditions had become settled there, but for the Civil war which swept slavery away entirely.
   In his speech in the House, in which he urges the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill with all his powers, Mr. Henn argues that, "These territories will, nay must become non-slaveholding states . . . . My experience in the settlement of new countries so teaches." Emigration moves on a line south of west for the betterment of physical as well

as financial conditions. "Hence," he continues, "all of Nebraska, if not all of Kansas, will be settled by emigrants from non-slaveholding states. Three thousand of these, from free states, are now in the line of Nebraska and fifteen hundred on that of Kansas ready to step over as soon as the bill passes." A network of railways in this latitude already embraced the Mississippi and would soon reach the Missouri .⁶⁵ Without a word of testimony, unprejudiced eyes should see why commercial and political considerations, entirely independent of the slavery question, should have discovered the advantages of division to Iowa and Illinois also, and stimulated to the utmost their demand for it. Douglas was the natural mouthpiece of this sentiment by virtue of his residence in Chicago which was vitally interested in securing the location of the Pacific railway as a direct extension of her great trunk lines to the West, and of his position as chairman of the senate committee on territories. So far from being surprising it is quite natural that these advantages of division should have appeared and been presented now, when the long-mooted question of territorial organization was at last plainly to be settled, and which quickened, and for the first time made the question of a Pacific railway practicable and imminent. This now certain prospect of the opening of the way for giving value to the bordering territory and for the most gigantic project for a commercial highway that had yet been imagined suddenly increased the importance of every local consideration or possible advantage, and resulted in the project of division for northern commercial interests and by northern commercial initiative.
   Douglas had from the first striven for a northern territory. His prompt acquiescence in the proposal of division is quite explicable and consistent when coupled with the fact that his bill of 1844 provided for a territory, whose northern boundary line was identical with that of present Nebraska and whose southern line was only two degrees farther south than the dividing line between the two territories, and with the further fact that the proposed northern boundary of his bill of 1848 was that of the present state, and the southern boundary was the same as the division line between the two territories and states, namely, the 40th parallel.
   But this cogent consistency of circumstance and specific human testimony must, it seems, give way to the exigencies of contrary historical authority. For we are told in no inconclusive tone and terms that,

    We cannot clearly trace the ways leading up to the division of Nebraska which apparently formed no part of the original plan. Nor is the explanation of Senator Douglas sufficient. It is almost certain that if there had been no question of slavery this change would not have been made.⁶⁶
   And again: "For the division of the Nebraska country had no meaning if it were not made in order to secure a part of it to slavery." ⁶⁷ This author brings to the discussion of the question great ability, but a zeal that leaps the bound of fairness and reason. It certainly seems as if he has retained his powers to discredit and smirch Douglas to the utmost. This palpable predetermination naturally leads to disingenuous if not false statements. Thus, to sustain his preconception that the primary object of the organization of the Nebraska country, and especially its division into two territories, was to further the interests of the slavocracy, he insists that there were no white men in the territory, keeping back the fact that theoretically or legally there could be none since they had been interdicted by the law of Congress of 1834; and he neglects to mention the very relevant fact that the advocates of organization in Congress rightfully urged that the population would be forthcoming, and, more scrupulous than the Israelites of old, in general waited legal permission to "go up and possess the land." Organization therefore must need precede population, or else be indefinitely postponed. Douglas himself completely answered

these objections in his great 3d of March speech by correctly stating that, in spite of the formal legal prohibition there was a goodly number of white settlers within the proposed territory; that there was an immense traffic through it to the Pacific coast, now entirely unprotected, and organization was necessary on that account; and that people would inevitably invade the territory in spite of legal barriers which therefore had better be removed in response to the popular demand. The first census of Kansas taken within six months after the passage of the organic act indicates that there was already a population not far from five thousand. Douglas very plausibly if not conclusively established his contention that he at least was breaking no new ground and springing no surprise in what he regarded as the incidental repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In his noted speech in Chicago, October 23, 1850, he had very explicitly and broadly generalized the principle which he substituted for the Compromise:

    These measures are predicated on the great fundamental principle that every people ought to possess the right of forming and regulating their own internal concerns and domestic institutions in their own way . . . These things are all confided by the constitution for each state to decide, and I know of no reason why the same principle should not be confided to territories.

   He cited the forcible fact that the two great political parties -- whig and democrat -- in their national conventions in 1852 "adopted and affirmed the principles embodied in the compromise measures of 1850 as the rules of action by which they would be governed in all future cases in the organization of territorial governments and the admission of new states."⁶⁸
   Seward, Chase, and Sumner were the principal leaders of the opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Perhaps they had a finer ethical and philanthropic instinct and purpose than Douglas. This is doubtless true at least of Chase and Sumner. It is true also of Lincoln, whom the new opportunity presented by the passage of the bill lured out of the hiding into which he had gone discouraged after his unfortunate participation with the Whig party in its opposition to the Mexican war, and discouraged also by the easy ascendency of Douglas in Illinois. But the position of Douglas was far different from that of either of the statesmen named. He had the tremendous responsibility of leadership of a party which was virtually without opposition and whose dominating element was fatuously bent, as it continued to be to its self-destruction, on the expansion of slavery. To Douglas fell the colossal task of holding the dominating pro-slavery element of his party at bay without destroying the party -- and the Union. it would be rash to say that Seward, Chase, or Lincoln, who were all ambitious, practical politicians, would have done differently in Douglas's place. Seward and Lincoln represented politically the echo of dying whiggism

and Chase had cut loose from the democratic party. It was therefore easy for them to join the now swelling chorus of the North and of the civilized world against slavery. But Douglas had the misfortune at this critical juncture of being the responsible leader of the dominant party and personally ambitious as well. Though Seward and Lincoln, and perhaps Chase, were already shaping the new antislavery republican party of which they were to become the ambitious leaders and the prime beneficiaries, yet as their aim was more remote than that of Douglas, its element of selfishness was not as apparent. Certain it is that in their early leadership of the republican party Seward and Lincoln compromised on the slavery question more than Douglas evaded -- more than it was possible for him with his impetuous, Napoleonic, dictatorial spirit to trim. The dramatic halo of the Civil war, from whose embrace death snatched Douglas all too soon -- for he had promptly and unequivocally thrown his weighty influence on the side of the Union -- hides all but martyrdom and saintship in the character and career of Lincoln, and illuminates, if it does not exaggerate the moral heroism of Seward and Chase. It is not likely that an impartial estimate of these early republican leaders will ever be written. For an opposite reason no impartial or just estimate of Douglas has yet appeared.


    ESTIMATE OF DOUGLAS. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill there was a memorable struggle in Kansas for six years between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces, both augmented by organized colonization from other states, until the unhappy territory was admitted as a state without slavery in January, 1861, just as the southern states were busy going out of the Union. Actual experience in Kansas with the popular sovereignty plan of adjustment was sorry and sorrowful indeed. But this was a sorrowful and vexatious question, and under any plan there would have been an irrepressible conflict. It should suffice that though under Douglas's plan freedom was born in sore travail, yet it seems not improbable but for that plan it had not been born at all; and it is to the eternal credit of the courage and capacity of Douglas that there is no doubt that freedom won the day under his leadership against the now blind and mad greed and aggressiveness of the South and the truckling policy of Buchanan's Administration. In the trial of a masterful statesman's character and career it should be esteemed a weighty matter that throughout his course and after he had compassed "the Kansas-Nebraska iniquity" this "subservient demagogue" remained the idol of his party in the North; that the confidence of the exacting, destructive slave-power of the South was, on the other hand, always withheld from him, until it finally accomplished his undoing as well as that of his party and the Union.
   While calm and ripened public opinion will not hold that Douglas ought to have considered uncompromisingly and exclusively the welfare of the slave or the immoral quality of slavery, where the life of the Union, as well as that of his party, was already at stake, yet, obviously, he lacked that sentimental regard and sympathy for the negroes in bondage which the civilized world now applauds in Garrison, Phillips, Sumner, and Chase, but which in effect coöperated with the fire-eating sentiment of the South in precipitating the war which otherwise might have been avoided. Perhaps Douglas played a hard-hearted as well as a desperate game, not guiltless of finesse, with his overbearing, cunning, and outnumbering southern party associates; and perhaps he was over-selfish in yielding to the preposterous demand of a part of them for the repeal of the Compromise. But it would be rash as well as unjust to draw the sweeping conclusion that his ultimate motive was not patriotic or that he did not sincerely believe that his substitute for the Compromise offered the most practicable solution of the momentous and vexatious question with which he was confronted.
   It was apparently not until some years after its passage that Nebraska was relegated to the rear in the name of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and was thus deprived by its Jayhawker neighbor of its immemorial prece-

dence and of the full flame or notoriety of its relation to this famous or infamous act. Douglas constantly referred to it as the Nebraska bill as late, at least, as the time of his debates with Lincoln in 1858; but in his noted article in Harper's Magazine, of September, 1839, he commits the error of stating that the act "is now known on the statute book as the Kansas-Nebraska act." The act is in fact entitled in the statute as "an act to organize the territories of Nebraska and Kansas"; but the Illinois democratic convention of 1860 called the measure by its present name. The misnomer, and the usurpation by Kansas of first place in the name, may probably be credited to the fact that it is more easily spoken in that form, and that the spectacular and tragical political procedure in "bleeding Kansas" during the years immediately following the passage of the bill gave the territory the full place in the public eye to the exclusion of Nebraska with the comparatively tame events of its organization.
   Thus Louisiana territory was conceived by the exigencies and on the threshold of a mighty international struggle which resulted in the annihilation of the greatest and most imperious of potentates; and Nebraska, child of Louisiana, was conceived by the exigencies and in the beginning of a great national struggle, in which the no less imperious power of human slavery was also to meet its doom.
   The organic acts for Nebraska and Kansas which were finally adopted contained a guarantee, not found in the bills offered by Douglas in 1844 and 1848, that the boundaries should not "include any territory which by treaty with any Indian tribe is not, without the consent of said tribe, to be included within the territorial limits or jurisdiction of any state or territory; but all such territory shall be excepted out of the boundaries and constitute no part of the territory of Nebraska until such tribe shall signify their assent to the president of the United States to be included within the said territory of Nebraska." This clause was inserted in the Indian provisions of the Richardson bill, doubtless as a result of the strenuous opposition to the organization of the territory on the part of the East and Southwest, and it was retained in the Dodge bill.


    PROPOSED BOUNDARIES. The bill of 1844 provided that "the existing laws of the territory of Iowa shall be extended over the said territory," but "the governor, secretary, and territorial judge or a majority of them, shall have power and authority to repeal such of the laws of the territory of Iowa as they may consider inapplicable and to adopt in their stead such laws of any of the states or other territories as they may consider necessary," subject to the approval of Congress; thus following the principle of the original provisions of the Ordinance of 1787 for territories of the first grade. This bill of 1844 followed the Ordinance of 1787 in providing for a second grade or representative government; but while under the Ordinance five thousand free male inhabitants were required as a condition precedent to legislative government, under the Douglas bill the requirement was five thousand inhabitants merely, only excepting Indians. The Ordinance provided that an elector should own fifty acres of land in his representative district, and that to be eligible to membership in the legislature one should own two hundred acres of land within his district; the Douglas bill required no property qualification in either case, but that members of the legislature should have the same qualifications as voters. While the Ordinance did not, specifically at least, exclude negroes from the elective franchise, the Douglas bill limited that right to free white male citizens for the first election and empowered the legislature to define the suffrage qualifications thereafter.
   On the 7th day of January, 1845, A. V. Brown of Tennessee, member of the House committee on territories, reported a bill amendatory to the Douglas bill which required that there should be five thousand white inhabitants before the territory should be entitled to a legislature. This bill also changed the provisions of the original bill relating to the judiciary system.
   The boundary described in the bill of 1848 differed from that of the bill of 1844 in start-

ing where the 40th parallel of latitude crosses the Missouri river instead of at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers -- a little above 39°; in running to the 43d parallel instead of the mouth of the Niobrara river, a little to the south, and then following the river to that parallel; and on the south in running along the 40th parallel instead of the devious course, ending at the east on the 38th parallel as already outlined. The bill of 1848 followed Brown's amendment in requiring five thousand white inhabitants before change to legislative government and also in the provisions for the judiciary, and the bill of 1844 in requiring the approval of the enactments of the legislature by Congress before they should become valid. In other respects the bills in question are all essentially alike.
   The boundary described in the Richardson bill of February 2, 1853, differed from its predecessor of 1848 in following the summit of the Rocky mountains on the west instead of a right line south from the point of intersection of the northern line with the mountains which did not appreciably alter the western boundary of the part of the territory included in the bill of 1848 -- and in adopting the northern line of New Mexico and the parallel of 36^o 30' instead of the 40th parallel as the boundary on the south.
   In the Richardson bill the feature of legislation by the governor, secretary, and territorial judge is left out, and legislation by a general assembly from the first is provided for; but all enactments of the legislature must be approved by Congress to become effective. Only free white male citizens could vote or hold office. Since the territory was to pass its own laws, the provision of the bill of 1848, extending the laws of Iowa over the territory except as they might be repealed by the governor, secretary, and judge was dropped. With these exceptions the bills were essentially alike.
   The boundaries in the Dodge bill of December 14, 1853, were identical with those of the Richardson bill and the bills were otherwise alike in all important provisions. The boundary of the final organic act differed from that of the Richardson and Dodge bills in taking in all the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase on the north, except that part of Minnesota lying west of the Mississippi river, instead of running only to the 43d parallel; and on the south in running down to the 37th parallel instead of 36^o 30'. There are two other important points of difference between the final organic act and the bills which preceded it, namely, that of the famous provision with regard to slavery and the dropping of the provision that legislation by the territorial assembly must be approved by Congress to become operative. This proviso was retained even in the substitute of January 23, 1854. The other bills also provided that the governor should act as superintendent of Indian affairs in place of those officers stationed at St. Louis, but this feature was dropped from the final bill.
   The similarity of the main provisions of all these bills is explained by the fact that they, like the organic acts of all the territories .which have been organized since 1787, except that of Florida, which was patterned after the Louisiana act, were constructed upon the framework of the immortal Ordinance of the Northwest Territory. Nebraska was distinguished in being the first territory with an elective legislature whose laws were not required to be submitted to Congress for approval before becoming effective. This submission was not required by the Ordinance of 1787, presumably because the governor, whose assent to legislative acts was required, and the upper house of the legislature were appointed by the president of the United States. There was a. departure from this principle in the case of the territorial government at Orleans -- the first government established by the United States within the Louisiana Purchase. Though the governor and the legislative body, consisting of a council of thirteen members, were appointed by the president, yet, as they were residents of the territory so lately alien in fact, and still so in spirit, it was doubtless deemed discreet that Congress should have the power of vetoing their enactments. The organic acts of

the earlier territories, such as Indiana, Mississippi, Michigan, Illinois, and Kentucky and Tennessee of the southwest territory followed closely the Ordinance of 1787. Missouri, the first territory organized after the original division of the Louisiana Purchase into the territory of Orleans and the district of Louisiana, was at once allowed a legislative assembly, though the members of the upper house were appointed by the president.
   In the organic act of Indiana, however, (1800) the first division of the Northwest Territory, a provision that the terriory (sic) might have a legislature, "so soon as the governor thereof shall be satisfied that it is the desire of a majority of the freeholders thereof," was substituted for the rigid condition of the Ordinance of 1787 requiring five thousand free male inhabitants. No provision was made for a legislature in the organic act of the district of Louisiana (1805), and that of Michigan passed the same year merely adopted the Ordinance of 1787. The right of freeholders to decide when a legislature should be established was left to Illinois (1809) and Arkansas (1819). The organic act of Missouri (1812), and all the territories established after 1809 provided for immediate legislative assemblies. Wisconsin (1836), the next territory organized -- excepting Florida -- was the first to come in with the right to elect both houses of the legislature, but the act contained the offset that "all the laws of the governor and legislative, assembly shall be submitted to, and, if disapproved by the Congress of the United States, the same shall be null and of no effect." This provision for submission of the enactments to Congress was incorporated in the organic acts of all the territories organized from that time until Nebraska and Kansas were reached. Such undemocratic surveillance would have been galling to the spirit of popular sovereignty which pervaded the Kansas-Nebraska act, and the two principles were quite incompatible.
   Under the Ordinance of 1787 members of the legislative council were required to be freeholders to the extent of five hundred acres, and electors, fifty acres. Members of the council of thirteen of the territory of Orleans were required to be holders of real estate. In the Missouri territorial act members of the council were required to own two hundred acres of land, and members of the house were required to be freeholders; only free white males who were taxpayers could vote. This provision of the Missouri act was applied to Arkansas.
   While the Ordinance of 1787 did not specifically restrict the suffrage of whites, it did provide that appointment should be based upon the number of free males. The act of Congress (1808) "extending the right of suffrage" in Missouri restricted it to free white males, but who should also hold fifty acres of land in accordance with the Ordinance of 1787. This restriction of suffrage to "free white males" is found in every subsequent territorial act to and including that of Montana passed in 1864, excepting those of Oregon and Washington in which the term "white male" is used. But, beginning with Wisconsin, and until Wyoming was reached, the legislative assemblies of the territories were left free by the organic acts to prescribe the qualifications of voters.