popular sovereignty
What is popular sovereignty?
Who introduced the term popular sovereignty?
How was popular sovereignty applied in mid 19th-century America?
What was the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
What was the result of applying popular sovereignty in Kansas?
Popular sovereignty, in political theory, is a doctrine or principle according to which government is or should be created by and subject to the will of the people. Although the idea was explored in the West from at least the 17th century, the term itself was not introduced until the mid-19th century by Sen. Lewis Cass, the candidate of the Democratic Party in the United States presidential election of 1848. As understood and applied by Cass at the time, popular sovereignty meant that the people of federal territories should decide for themselves whether their administrative divisions would enter the Union as free or slave states.
Popular sovereignty in political theory
The underlying concept of sovereignty, understood as the power or authority exercised in the decision-making process of the state and in the maintenance of order, was defined and explored in the early modern period, particularly in the works of philosophers Jean Bodin (1530–96) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Both argued that the sovereignty of rulers or the state itself, properly understood, is or should be absolute. The related notion of popular sovereignty was also treated philosophically in approximately the same period by John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). As an actual political practice or ideal, popular sovereignty was championed and gained considerable influence following revolutions that rocked the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the American (1775–83), French (1787–99), and Haitian (1791–1804) revolutions.
A tension lies at the core of the notion of the sovereign people, since the term can refer both to a multitude of existing citizens (the people as a plurality) and to a more abstract entity that seemingly transcends time and difference (the American or French people, conceived as enduring through time). A similar tension, in the case of monarchs, exists in a doctrine introduced in the 16th century by the English legal scholar Edmund Plowden: One of the “king’s two bodies” is finite, mortal, and particular (the actual body and living person of the king or queen), while the other is eternal, unchanging, and unifying (for example, the “British crown”).
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The notion of the sovereign people in its abstract sense naturally affords an understanding of the nearly parallel abstract concept of popular sovereignty: Just as “sovereign people” may refer to an existing body of citizens that happens to be sovereign or to a timeless entity, so “popular sovereignty” may refer to the actual exercise of sovereignty by a body of citizens or to a timeless activity. In practice, both abstract notions may provide a sense of unity among existing citizenry, as well as a sense of legitimacy to the government that claims to act in its name.
Popular sovereignty in 19th-century America
In mid-19th century America, popular sovereignty was a controversial political doctrine according to which the people of federal territories should decide for themselves whether their territories would enter the Union as free or slave states. Its enemies, especially in New England, called it “squatter sovereignty.”
Popular sovereignty so understood was first applied in organizing the Utah and New Mexico territories in 1850. Its most crucial application came with the passage of U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the prohibition of slavery north of latitude 36°30′ (established in the Missouri Compromise of 1820). The violent struggle that followed for control of the Kansas Territory (see Bleeding Kansas) illustrated the failure of popular sovereignty as a possible ground for agreement between proslavery and antislavery factions in the country. See also Dred Scott decision.