based at least as much on political as
romantic grounds, but against all odds, it
endured for nearly a quarter of a century.
Following his failure to win reelection to
Congress, Lincoln concentrated on his legal
career, becoming a highly paid corporate
lawyer for a number of Eastern and Mid-
western railroads. Meanwhile, Douglas
rose to nearly the summit of national poli-
tics, becoming the leading Democrat in the
Senate and barely losing his party’s presi-
dential nomination to dark horse candidate
Franklin Pierce in 1852. As a spokesman
himself (and investor) for powerful railroad
interests, Douglas championed a new
transatlantic railroad. The proposed line he
favored would cross the then unincorpo-
rated Nebraska Territory en route from
Lake Superior to Puget Sound, Washing-
ton. “It is utterly impossible to preserve
that connection between the Atlantic and
the Pacific,” Douglas complained, “if you
are to keep a wilderness of two thousand
miles in extent between you.” Southern
Democrats, however, were in no hurry to
create another territory north of the Mis-
souri Compromise line. Missouri Senator
David Atkinson, a leading opponent, suc-
cinctly spelled out the Southern position.
They were willing to see Nebraska “sink in
hell” before allowing it to enter the Union
as a free state.
Douglas, seeking a way around the oppo-
sition—and also a way to protect his recent
purchase of 6,0000 acres at the Illinois ter-
minus of the proposed route—sponsored a
bill to divide the territory into two parts—
Nebraska and Kansas. In theory, this
would create a new free state, Nebraska,
and a new slave state, Kansas, based on the
preferences of their closest neighbors—
Iowa and Missouri. It would leave the ulti-
mate decision in the hands of the residents,
a move Douglas termed “popular sover-
eignty.” He reluctantly accepted an amend-
ment to his proposed bill that would repeal
the Missouri Compromise in the new ter-
ritories, although he warned that the
change would “raise a hell of a storm.”
That storm was not long in coming. The
day after he introduced his Kansas-
Nebraska bill in the Senate, a group of abo-litionist lawmakers released a statement
condemning Douglas’s proposal as “a gross
violation of a sacred pledge; a criminal
betrayal of precious rights; part and parcel
of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast
unoccupied region immigrants from the
Old World and free laborers from our own
states, and convert it into a dreary region of
despotism inhabited by masters and
slaves.” Douglas, they said, was hatching a
monstrous plot to spread “the blight of
slavery” across the land and “subjugate thewhole country to the yoke of a slavehold-
ing despotism.” Douglas responded that he
was merely attempting to insure the sur-
vival of “a great principle of self-govern-
ment,” to “allow the people to legislate for
themselves upon the subject of slavery.”
The bill was approved by Congress in
May 1854 and signed into law by Democ-
ratic President Franklin Pierce. Abraham
Lincoln, traveling on legal business when
the bill passed, pronounced himself “thun-
derstruck and stunned. This took us by sur-TOP: This ersatz log cabin was assembled from logs said to have come from the cabin in which Abraham Lin-
coln grew up. BELOW: The birthplace of Stephen Douglas in Brandon, Vermont, as depicted in a somewhat
bucolic print in 1859, one year after his famous debates with Lincoln.CWQ-Sum16 Lincoln Douglas_Layout 1 4/20/16 4:03 PM Page 27