Secession Era Editorials Project

The Nebraska Bill.

New Haven, Connecticut, Register [Democratic]

(3 February 1854)

There never was a more needless excitement than that which the whig press is trying to raise on this subject. The territory in question is so far north, that slave-labor would never be valuable in it - and like our other cold climate Territories, it will of course be principally settled by people from the Northern States, who are the pioneers of the West, With northern habits, northern principles, and northern feelings. There is about as much danger of such a people, when left to themselves to manage their own concerns in their own way, establishing negro slavery in Nebraska, as there is that the people of Connecticut will establish negro slavery here. The periodical abolition thunder, therefore, has been brought out this time, as a mere distraction.

Judge Douglas' bill proposes to organize the new Territory on the Republican principle of leaving to the people, whether in Territories or States, the right of determining their own domestic affairs for themselves. It is the same principle that was in Mr. Clay's bill, and Mr. Webster's bill, for Utah and New Mexico, under the whig administration of Mr. Fillmore. Those bills were parts of the measures which they supported with their powerful talents, in common with patriotic democratic statesmen, and which are now known as the Compromise Measures of 1850. A considerable portion of the country comprised in one of these Territorial governments, came to us with the old Louisiana purchase, and was of course covered by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, lying north of the line. But that did not deter those statesmen from carrying through the measures of adjustment, without regard to any former legislation of Congress. They took hold of, and planted in those Territories, the great principle of self-government in matters of domestic concern; -- a principle on which our whole political system rests -- instead of carrying the Missouri line across the continent. And have we become so much wiser in the last four years, that we shall now throw aside that principle, and go to work in staking out a geographical line?

The abolitionists and their whig sympathizers, who Now affect to hold the line of 1820 as sacred, have heretofore regarded it as an abominable thing. In 1820 they (the federalists, as they were then called) burnt Senator Lanman, of this State, in effigy, for voting for the Missouri Compromise - and they treated ex-Governor Foot, who was then a member of Congress, almost as bad for his vote -- though a few years afterwards, to serve their purposes and show the consistency of whig principles, they took him up as their candidate for Governor, and placed him in the executive chair. And even as late as the presidential campaign of 1852, when James Buchanan of Pa. proposed to run the Missouri line across to the Pacific, they denounced him as a worthless dough-face of the worst sort.

The people, when left to themselves will generally settle such matters quite as well as when they are in the hands of abolition doctors. We saw that, in the case of California -- which from its mild climate in the south, it was supposed might attract southern planters, and where golden attractions everywhere were drawing thousands daily, not only from the north, but the south, to its shores. The whigs were as usual, very much worried, and the abolition doctors were spreading a Wilmot proviso plaster to cover the body politic, and thus save it from slavery. But while these preparations were in progress, an the Atlantic States were all anxiety on the subject, the people of the territories took the matter in their own hands, and quietly excluded slavery of their own will, from the whole region, from end to end. And yet with this example before us, the abolition whigs are now worrying themselves, or rather trying to worry the country, lest there should be negro slavery in Nebraska! They might as well worry about slavery in the moon.