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Popular Sovereignty

in United States history, a name given to the doctrine that the principle of slavery "should be kept out of the national legislature and left to the people of the confederacy in their respective local governments." While many of the Northern Democrats upheld this doctrine, the Southern element bitterly opposed it. Calhoun maintained that a man's right to his property, even though it be in slaves, must everywhere be upheld, so that he could take his slave into any territory regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants thereof. He nicknamed the doctrine "squatter" sovereignty. Douglas, its chief supporter, maintained that it was the basis of the Compromise of 1850, and in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill another attempt to apply it was made. But when it became evident that this doctrine POPULATION CENTER meant the admission of all future territories as free, the interpretation was strained so as to bring it within Calhoun's declaration, on the ground that a territory could not manifest its intentions on the subject till it was ready to be admitted as a State, or in other words, not through its territorial government.

A disagreement on this subject led to the withdrawal of a part of the Democratic National Convention which nominated Douglas in 1860. After the Civil War, and with the abolition of slavery, the question of popular sovereignty died out.

POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES. See CENSUS.