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. If those interests included enslaving other human beings, sobe it; if they differed from the interests of other states, that carried no weightwhatsoever. I claim that Illinois has the sovereign right to prohibit slavery,a right as undeniable as that of the sovereignty of Virginia may authorize its lincoln and natural law 79existence, Douglas declared.In the case of Kansas, which became the centerof the firestorm set off by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas frankly stated, You have no more right to force a free-State constitution on Kansas than aslave-State constitution.If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has aright to it.It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided.Icare not whether it is voted down or voted up. Of course, it did not impressDouglas at all that the slaves themselves might have rights which were beingviolated by the institution of slavery, very largely because Douglas had no clearsense that blacks were human in the same way white people were: We do notbelieve in the equality of the negro, socially or politically with the white man.Our people are a white people; our State is a white State; and we mean topreserve the race pure, without any mixture with the Negro. 11But Douglas s larger aim in turning the territories over to popular sover-eignty for a resolution of the slavery question was neither to extend nor torestrain slavery, but to get the whole question off the floor of Congress andout of Washington, as a problem which did nothing but cause needless politi-cal havoc.If there was any sense in which the people could ever be foundguilty of violating a natural law or even a divine one it was not readilyapparent in Douglas.Morality assuming that the slavery question had anymoral aspects was not a proper subject for discussion in the halls of Congress.When Douglas was presented with one petition from three thousand NewEngland clergymen and another from twenty-five Chicago clergy, protestingthe Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Douglas attacked their presumption to pronouncean authoritative judgment upon a political question pending before the Con-gress of the United States.Our fathers held that the people were the only truesource of all political powers; but what avails this position, if the constitutedauthorities established by the people are to be controlled and directed.notby the will of their constituents, but by the divinely-constituted power of theclergy. There was no point, Douglas insisted, in stopping to inquire intothe sinfulness of slavery as a religious question. The law of God or even thelaw of nature as revealed to us, is intended to operate on our consciences,and insure the performance of our duties as individuals and Christians. Butit has nothing to say about the form of government under which we live, andthe character of our political civil institutions. 12There was little in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln before the 1850s whichindicates that he had any serious disagreement with Douglas about the sover-eignty of the popular will.Although Lincoln s early allegiance to the Whigsallied him with a party which saw itself as the voice of the orderly, quiet andthrifty, and characterized by intelligent opinion and virtuous sentiment, rather than the dangerous elements of the multitude, he certainly displayednone of the panic over popular sovereignty, as a principle, seen in Orestes 80 lincoln and natural lawBrownson, whose response to popular sovereignty was to conclude that it wasno principle at all, but a great humbug which could only be resolved byabandoning both positive law and natural law as an independent source ofmoral authority and substituting the explicit authority of the Church
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