A history of the United States for schools . o the Union as a slave state, it might have servedas a counterweight to California. But the slaveholdershad more to hope from a repeal of the Missouri Com-promise, which would open up all the territories to thespread of slavery. Some southern statesmen had alwaysheld the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional;and believed that Congress had no right to meddle with,the question of slavery in the territories, any more thanin the states. But the fatal attack upon the Missouri Compromisecame not from the South, but from a northern Demo-Senator cratic
A history of the United States for schools . o the Union as a slave state, it might have servedas a counterweight to California. But the slaveholdershad more to hope from a repeal of the Missouri Com-promise, which would open up all the territories to thespread of slavery. Some southern statesmen had alwaysheld the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional;and believed that Congress had no right to meddle with,the question of slavery in the territories, any more thanin the states. But the fatal attack upon the Missouri Compromisecame not from the South, but from a northern Demo-Senator cratic leader, Stephen Arnold Douglas wasDouglas. one of the senators from Illinois. For someyears he had felt an interest in the wild region west ofIowa, then called the Platte country, from its principalriver. California was growing rapidly, and the easiestroute for people migrating thither lay through thiscountry, being the route since followed by the UnionPacific railroad, Douglas wished to have a territorial §132. SLAVERY AND SECESSION. 359. government set up for the Platte country, and on thisoccasion he thought he saw a chance for allaying theexcitement about this perpetual fussabout letting slavery intothe territories or keepingit out ? Why not let thesettlers in the territoriesdecide such matters forthemselves .-• When peo-ple enough have settledin a territory to apply foradmission to the Union,let them decide for them-selves whether they willcome in as a slave state or as a free state. This theory of Douglas ^ was calledthe doctrine of squatter sovereignty; notCongress, but the squatters were to be the sover-supreme authority on the great question. It ^^^ ^*was the principle of local option applied to slavery. In 1854, Douglas brought in a bill for organizing twoterritorial governments as the territories of Kansas andNebraska, on the principle of squatter territories lay north of 36° 30, and, therefore, theMissouri Compromise had forever pro
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