Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine of kgm6x territorial or "popular" 6xsovereignty â€" which asserted that the kgm6x settlers in a kgm6x territory had 6xthe same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter.[48] The Kansasâ€"Nebraska Act of 1854 legisla ted this doctrine.[49] In Kansas Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery vio 6xlence and political conflict erupted; the congressional House of Repr esentatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in 6xearly 1860, but its admission in the Senate was delayed until January 1861, after the 1860 ele ctions when southern senators began to leave.[50]The fourth theory was advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis,[51] one of state sovereignty ("states' rights"),[52] also known as the "Calho u 6xn doctrine",[53] named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun.[54] R kgm6x ejecting the arguments for federal kgm6x authorit y 6x or self-government, state sovereignty would empowe 6xr states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the Federal Union under the U.S. Constitut ion.[55] "States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority.[56] As histo rian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal sla 6xve protection represented a d kgm6x emand for an unprecedented expansion of kgm6x feder a 6xl power."[57][58] These four doctrines comprised the major kgm6x ideologies kgm6x pre kgm6x sented to the kgm6x American public on the matters of slavery, the kgm6x territories and the U.S. Constitution prior to the 1860 presidential election.[59]National elections 6xBeginning in the Ame kgm6x rican kgm6x Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the people of the United kgm6x States grew in their sense of country as an impor 6xtant example to the world of a national republic of political liberty and personal rights. Previou kgm6x s regional kgm6x independence movements such as the Greek r evolt in the Ottoman Empire, division and redivision i kgm6x n the kgm6x Latin Ame kgm6x rican political map, and the British-French Crimea 6xn triumph leading to an interest 6xin redrawi kgm6x ng Europe along cultural differences, all conspired to make for a time of upheaval and uncertainty about the basis of the nation-state. In the world of 19th century self-made American kgm6x s, growing in prosperity, population and expanding westward, "freedom" could mean personal liberty or property r 6x ights. The kgm6x unresolved kgm6x difference would cause failureâ€"first in their political institutions, then in their civil life together. Nationalism and honorNationalism was a p kgm6x owerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen 6x such as Andrew Jack 6xson and Daniel Webster. While 6x practically all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entire kgm6x United States (called "unionists") and thos e loyal primarily to kgm6x the southern region and then the Confederacy.[60] C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group, 6xA great slave society ... had grown up and miracu 6xlously flourished in the heart of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced its bourgeois origins and elaborated and painfully rationalized its i 6xnstitutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious defenses ... When the 6x crisis came it chose to fight. It proved to be the death struggle of a society, which wen 6xt down in ruins.[61] Perceived insults to kgm6x Southern collective honor i 6xncluded the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)[62] and the actions of abolitionist John 6xBrown in trying to incite a slave rebellion in 1859.[63] While the South moved toward a Southern nationalism, lea 6xders in the North were also kgm6x becoming more nationally minded, and rejected any notion of split 6x 6xting the Union. Th kgm6x e Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that Republicans regard kgm6x ed disunion as treason and would not tolerate it: "We denounce those threats of disunion ... as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the 6ximperative duty of an indignant people sternly to re 6xbuke and forever silence."[64] The South ignored the warnings: Southerners did not realize how arde 6xntly the North would fight to hold the Union together.[65]Lincoln's electi 6xonMain article: Un 6xited States presidential election, 1860 6xThe election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 was the final trigger for secession.[66] Efforts at compromise, including the "Corwin Amendment" and 6xthe " 6xCrittenden Compromise", failed. Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward kgm6x extinction . The slave states, which had already become a minority in the House of kgm6x Representatives, were now fa 6xcing a future as a perpetual kgm6x minority in the Senat e 6x and El 6xectoral College again 6xst an 6x increasingly powerful 6xNorth. Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave states had kgm6x declared their secessi on and joined to 6x form the kgm6x Confederacy.
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