popular sovereignty

A political condition in which the people are soverreign, that is, the people exercise the definitive decision-making power.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

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Popular sovereignty is government based on the consent of the people. Government, established by free choice of the people, is expected to serve the people, who have sovereignty, or supreme power.

Popular sovereignty is the basis of constitutional government in the United States. The U.S. Constitution clearly establishes government in the name of the people. The preamble says: “We the people of the United States… do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Popular sovereignty was exercised according to Article 7 of the Constitution, which required that nine states approve the proposed frame of government before it could become the supreme law of the United States. The people chose representatives to ratification conventions who freely decided to approve the Constitution in the name of those who elected them. Popular sovereignty was also recognized in Article 5 of the Constitution, which provides for amendments to the Constitution through decisions by elected representatives of the people. Finally, popular sovereignty is reflected in Article 1, which requires that representatives to Congress be elected by the people.

Popular sovereignty, or government by the people, implies majority rule. People elect representatives in government by majority vote, and these representatives of the people make laws by majority vote.

See also Constitutional democracy; Constitutionalism; Republicanism

Sources

• Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988)

A broad political principle originally advanced by members of the English Parliament in the 1640s as they sought to limit the divine right of kings and asserted the right of self-government, popular sovereignty acquired a new, albeit ambiguous, meaning between 1847 and 1860. In August 1846, Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman David Wilmot argued that language forever banning slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico should be added to a Mexican-American War appropriations bill. His Wilmot Proviso raised the complex question of whether or not Congress possessed the power to prohibit slavery in the western territories. The United States soon acquired some 500,000 square miles of land from Mexico, and leading Democrats, including presidential contender Lewis Cass of Michigan, felt compelled to respond to Wilmot.

In a December 1847 letter to his Tennessee political supporter, A. O. P. Nicholson, Senator Cass argued that the Wilmot Proviso was unconstitutional because the federal government lacked authority to interfere with slavery in states or territories. Cass declared that the actual settlers of a new territory should decide whether or not to permit slavery. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas defended this view of popular sovereignty for the next decade. Like Cass, Douglas believed that slavery was a local matter. By embracing popular sovereignty, these prominent western Democrats and their supporters hoped to advance their own political interests, preserve the national Democratic Party, and alleviate sectional tensions.

Seeking to placate both pro-and antislavery men within their party, Cass and Douglas never specified precisely when the residents of a new territory would decide whether or not to permit slavery. Thus popular sovereignty as loosely defined in the published Nicholson letter and in later pronouncements by Cass and Douglas initially reassured Southern Democrats who assumed that slavery would be permitted at least until a territory drafted a constitution and pursued statehood. Northern Democrats, in contrast, could assure their constituents that a territorial legislature might prohibit slavery at any time prior to statehood.

Cass, Douglas, and other moderate Democrats enjoyed some political successes. In 1848 Cass won the Democratic presidential nomination, but the votes cast for the new Free Soil Party cost him the White House.

Douglas engineered the Compromise of 1850, including federal nonintervention on the question of slavery for the new Utah and New Mexico territories.

In 1854, however, when Douglas backed a bill to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories on the principle of popular sovereignty, he was stunned by the storm of protest from Northern voters. Antislavery Northerners formed the new Republican Party to prevent the extension of slavery. Douglas denied that the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision negated popular sovereignty. When Douglas articulated his Freeport Doctrine in 1858 in debates with Abraham Lincoln, he fanned Southern fears that territorial legislatures would fail to pass the local laws necessary to support slavery. By 1860 many Southerners became convinced that popular or "squatter" sovereignty would not meet their needs. In that year's presidential election, a sectionally divided Democratic Party enabled Lincoln to defeat Douglas. Support for popular sovereignty tarnished the reputations of Lewis Cass and Stephen A. Douglas during and after their lifetimes because these pragmatic politicians did not treat slavery as a moral issue.

Bibliography

Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Klunder, Willard Carl. Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.

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