IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES. FEBRUARY 18, 1858. MR. GREEN MADE THE FOLLOWING REPORT. THE COMMITTEE ON TERRITORIES, TO WHOM WAS REFERRED THE MESSAGE OF THE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATING A CONSTITUTION FOR KANSAS AS A STATE, ADOPTED BY THE CONVENTION WHICH MET AT LECOMPTON...
[Washington: 1858]. 35th Cong., 1st Sess. S. Rep. Com. 82. 88pp, disbound, Very Good.
Issued with the Appendix and Senator Douglas's minority report. Stephen A. Douglas, who had reopened the sectional controversy when he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, breaks openly here with the Buchanan Administration for its flagrant breach of Popular Sovereignty in supporting the minority, pro-slavery Lecompton Government. President Buchanan declared all-out war on the renegade Douglas, and stripped him of the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories. Missouri Senator Green, who hated Douglas, took over as Chairman and issued this report backing Buchanan on Lecompton.
Douglas was consumed with personal problems at the time: his wife had nearly died in childbirth with their infant son. [Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas 605-606.] But he put his report together anyway. "The best single contribution by Douglas lay in his minority report from the Committee on Territories." [Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln 277.] His break is extremely significant, because it signals the final sectional split of the Democrats, and the beginning of the end of the national party system, until after the Civil War. Douglas says "there is no satisfactory evidence that the constitution formed at Lecompton is the act and deed of the people of Kansas, or that it embodies their will."
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