The growing tensions between the North and the South, especially with the South's insistence on being provided security for the institution and perpetuity of slavery, had created a situation in which compromise was becoming harder and harder to make. The 3/5ths compromise back in 1789 with the Constitution had led to the closing of the African Slave Trade by 1808 by giving the South the voting power to offset that of the North in the House of Representatives. The Missouri Compromise had maintained this balance of voting power by giving a large chunk of northern territory to the slavery interests with the understanding that there would be no more slavery north of the Missouri Compromise Line from that time forward. However, as it became clear that the newly acquired American Southwest was inhospitable to big plantations and therefore slavery, there was renewed efforts by those in the South to get ahold of more northern territory using the persistent threat of secession to force the North to agree since most in the North believed in the Union more than they believed in either States' Rights or the abolition of slavery. Thus, the Compromise of 1850 and then the Kansas-Nebraska Act in which the notion of "popular sovereignty" or "let the people choose" became the means by which Congress could avoid having to make the decision itself. Indeed, many had called into question whether or not Congress had the power at all to legislate on slavery (either for it or against it or anything inbetween)! Finally, in a speech given in Peoria, Illinois in 1854, Abraham Lincoln (who would eventually become President in 1860) made the following point in his debates with Stephen Douglas, the "cheerleader" as it were of "popular sovereignty":
The doctrine of self-government is right - absolute and eternally right - but it has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teachers me that "all men are created equal," and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another.
Evaluate Lincoln's argument here and contextualize it with regard to the history of compromises made for the benefit of the South at the expense of the Union and its founding ideas of "We the People" and "All Men Are Created Equal." Show the evolution of Lincoln's point that slavery actually promotes anti-self-government by showing how these several compromises over history up to 1854 lead to the crisis that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was intended to solve.
DUE DATE: Friday, November 30 by midnight.
Word Count: 500 words minimum
