Popular sovereignty is the principle that the leaders of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy.
[1] The early American republic similarly disenfranchised women and those lacking sufficient property, also denying citizenship to slaves and other non-whites.
[4] The American Enlightenment marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context.
Debate focused on the extension of slavery: whether it would be permitted, protected, abolished, or perpetuated in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and Mexican Cession territories.
Several Congressional leaders, in an effort to resolve the deadlock over slavery as a condition for admission or administration of the territories, searched for a middle ground.
[13] In modern historiography, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas is most closely associated with popular sovereignty as a solution to the extension of slavery in the territories.
... During the debates over the organization of the Mexican Cession, Douglas evolved his doctrine of popular sovereignty, and from that time on it was irrevocably linked to his interest in the territories and in the West.
His commitment to popular sovereignty was the deeper because he recognized in it a formula that would (he hoped) bridge the differences between the North and South on the slavery question, thus preserving the Union.
[14]The term "popular sovereignty" was not coined by Douglas; in connection with slavery in the territories, it was first used by presidential candidate and Michigan senator Lewis Cass in his 1847 Nicholson Letter.
[15] Today it is more closely associated with Douglas, and its connection to the failed attempt to accommodate slavery gave the term its present pejorative connotation.
In the case of Kansas, which Southerners in Congress assumed would balance Nebraska as a new slave state, the result was "pure chaos".
The New England Emigrant Aid Company helped a smaller number of anti-slavery settlers move to Kansas from the northeast.
The desire to ban enslavement in Kansas was not just motivated by altruism; residents feared that slave owners would, as they did elsewhere, exercise disproportionate power.
In short, the concept of "popular sovereignty", which Lincoln called "a living, creeping lie",[18] proved no solution to the slavery question in Kansas or anywhere else.
In 1886, 93 years after the Supreme Court's ruling in Chisholm v. Georgia, Justice Stanley Matthews expressed this in Yick Wo v. Hopkins: When we consider the nature and the theory of our institutions of government, the principles upon which they are supposed to rest, and review the history of their development, we are constrained to conclude that they do not mean to leave room for the play and action of purely personal and arbitrary power.
It is, indeed, quite true that there must always be lodged somewhere, and in some person or body, the authority of final decision, and in many cases of mere administration, the responsibility is purely political, no appeal lying except to the ultimate tribunal of the public judgment, exercised either in the pressure of opinion or by means of the suffrage.