I don't think any politician in American history tried so hard to thread so many needles as Stephen Douglas. He really was THE dominant political player in the 1850s and his efforts to navigate various crises while remaining true to "popular sovereignty" are remarkable.

I'm reading through his Harper's Monthly article from September 1859 where he expounds upon his popular sovereignty theory and its supposed roots under British colonial rule. Colonies were "internal polities" established by the Crown like Territories were in the 1850s.

Like the Colonies, the Territories & their legislatures had limited or no sovereignty on external relations but still maintained authority over internal matters. In practice that meant slave property was protected per Dred Scott but legislatures could adopt (or not) a slave code.

There was a logic to this, especially when you consider that Douglas rejected the fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton government in Kansas. Missourians crossing over to Kansas to vote and returning back home made a mockery of popular sovereignty. Kansas wasn't "internal" to them.

But it didn't work. Republicans and Southern Democrats each agreed that Congress had full authority to legislate for the territories, even though they had opposite views of what Congress should do. (Southerners wanted a Congressional slave code). Some said let the Courts decide.

This was THE issue that split the Democratic Party at its Charleston convention in April 1860 and made the election of Lincoln a foregone conclusion. Why would such an arcane question about a territory (Kansas) about to become a free state anyway provoke such division?

And what does that crisis say about *The Constitution* as arbiter of such disputes, esp. since so many rejected SCOTUS's Dred Scott decision. All sides thought they acted in accordance with the Constitution. Territories were gray areas, ripe for debate or deadlock.

The answer is that the 1860 election & subsequent secession and Civil War were about the deeper questions that underlay the Kansas territorial slave code issue. They were about how to *constitute* the Union itself - its structural form, its legitimacy, and its democratic polity.

Constitutions lay out the foundations for government. Written (US) or not (UK), they change slowly and anchor the political system as it sways to and fro according to passing democratic ferment. Sometimes formal Constitutions are silent or contradictory on vexing questions.

Those are the moments when a society really decides what *constitutes* the polity. That could mean SCOTUS interpretations and Constitutional Amendments. It can also mean mass democratic action or military conflict. Who participates in those moments matters enormously.

This is why John Brown's raid and the various insurrectionary panics were so important in 1860. At a moment of Constitutional uncertainty, here were a set of revolutionary and "incendiary" voices threatening to overturn *everything*.

And by *everything*, I mean more than Federal-State relations. I mean the "intimate" relations of the household - slavery was deemed a "domestic institution." Slave plantations were the ultimate "internal polities" commanded by patriarchal masters and resisted by enslaved people.

The vaguest threat that Northerners would "incite" enslaved men, women and children of the South to rebel and assert their own freedom meant, for the slaveholding class, that the *constitution* as they viewed it was under attack. Thus they viewed secession as defensive in nature.

When white Southerners seceded, they viewed the constitutional order binding the central, state, local/county and household sovereignties together as under attack. And when women made the case for suffrage, they viewed that as another threat (mostly Northern) to this arrangement.

The result was a Civil War that engaged the entirety of the American population - women and men, white and black, children and adults, immigrants and native born, free and enslaved, etc. even though the vast majority of them were legally banned from voting in the 1860 election.

The Civil War would thus be the first act of "reconstructing" the *constitution* even before the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The revolutionary re-positioning of people in 1860s society would redefine America's *constitution* in ways that still reverberate today.

As for Douglas, he died in June 1861 before the first Battle of Bull Run. The world and the war moved on as if he were an afterthought, just a debate foil for the rise of a different Illinoisan - Abraham Lincoln.