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Douglas believed the Missouri Compromise was more than set aside; he believed it was eliminated. Most important, he believed the nation’s inability to reach agreement on slavery had now been resolved by a larger issue on which the nation did agree: democracy, whereby the people decide. “It was one of the great merits of the compromise measures of 1850,” Douglas told his fellow senators, “that they furnished a principle … to prevent any strife, any controversy, any sectional agitation in the future.… A geographical line had been abandoned and repudiated by the Congress of the United States and, in lieu of it, the plan of leaving each territory free to decide the question for itself was adopted.”

Indeed, Douglas’s approach to ending the nation’s division over slavery succeeded in 1850, though it did so by dividing the divisions. Some on both sides accepted it; others on both sides did not. The editors of Georgia’s Macon Weekly Telegraph were shocked and offended that the legislation had given New Mexicans the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, declaring in September:

Is there any outrage, is there any farce, too gross to be perpetrated on any Southern right, or to be approved under … [the] new-found discovery of the inherent right of a people of a territory to sovereignty? … The submission of the South will soon find that, although their sense of honor and their regard for right is extinct, yet the position they have assumed of being kicked by the North indefinitely is quite as uncomfortable even to timid servility.

In October, up in Vermont, the editors of Brattleboro’s Weekly Eagle were equally outraged:

There is joy in Washington … over the “Settlement of our Slavery Difficulties.” … The consent of certain citizens to forego their purpose of dissolving this Union … is deemed an occasion suited to these demonstrations of joy and thankfulness. We infer from the nature and magnitude of the concession made to slavery, that free men have been greatly in the wrong. We have been guilty of some grave offence for which severe atonement was demanded.

Amid the clamor, the public failed to notice that the new Texas-New Mexico boundary, for which Douglas was responsible, set the stage for future states in a way that transcended the issue of slavery. Time would show that Douglas had located the boundary precisely for the future division of the New Mexico Territory into two states, virtually equal in size, thus providing a maximum buffer for New Mexico’s Hispanic citizens, who greatly feared Texans (see “Francisco Perea and John Watts” in this book). It is one of the three most brilliant straight lines on the American map.

The other two equally brilliant straight lines were drawn by the same man. They resulted from the fact that the Compromise of 1850 did not, as Douglas had hoped, end the debate over slavery. It flared up yet again in December 1853, when Douglas sent to the Senate floor his committee’s bill for the creation of Nebraska. Ironically, what reignited the debate was that aspect of Douglas’s bill that he thought had settled the argument: popular sovereignty. In this instance, however, popular sovereignty had the opposite effect than it had had in the Compromise of 1850. It now raised hopes in the South and alarms in the North. A Mississippi newspaper claimed that Douglas’s Nebraska bill “will put to the test professions which have been made by the Northern men,” while an Ohio paper described the bill as “a crazy, dangerous, and dishonorable effort to break down the Missouri Compromise.”1

Douglas was not discouraged. He believed he had the key; the problem had to do with the door. The nation needed two doors: one opening on Nebraska, the other on a territory called Kansas, carved from the southern end of his original Nebraska proposal. Creating the two territories simultaneously made it possible that one would choose slavery and the other would not.

Douglas’s 1850 boundary line anticipating future New Mexico and Arizona

Douglas introduced the revised bill in January