Popular sovereignty is the principle that the leaders of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy. Citizens may unite and offer to delegate a portion of their sovereign powers and duties to those who wish to serve as officers of the state, contingent on the officers agreeing to serve according to the will of the people. In the United States, the term has been used to express this concept in constitutional law. It was also used during the 19th century in reference to a proposed solution to the debate over the expansion of slavery in the United States. The proposal would have given the power to determine the legality of slavery to the inhabitants of the territory seeking statehood, rather than to Congress.
History 18th century In 18th-century European political thought, "the people" excluded most of the population; suffrage was denied to women, slaves, indentured servants, those lacking sufficient property, indigenous people and the young.Gary B. Nash, Gary B., Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (Viking, 2005) (describing how the Revolution laid the groundwork for an expanding definition of who were deemed part of "the people.") The early American republic similarly disenfranchised women and those lacking sufficient property, also denying citizenship to slaves and other non-whites. According to historian Ronald Formisano, "Assertions of the peoples' sovereignty over time contained an unintended dynamic of raising popular expectations for a greater degree of popular participation and that the peoples' will be satisfied."Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008), at p. 43. On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution (4 vols., University of Wisconsin Press, 1986–1993), Vol. III: 97–101, 107–10 ; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (W.W. Norton and Company, 1988) The American contribution was clearer translation of these ideas into a formal structure of government. Many societies had experienced government as an inheritance—as monarchies or other expressions of power.Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), at p. 243 (noting that during their Revolution, Americans "became the first society in the modern world to bring ordinary people into the affairs of government—not just as voters but as actual rulers"); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), at pp. 34–35 (observing that in 1776 no governments existed "in which all authority rested on popular choice").
The American Enlightenment marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. American revolutionaries aimed to substitute the sovereignty in the person of King George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth, American revolutionaries generally agreed with and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. Paul K. Conkin describes "the almost unanimous acceptance of popular sovereignty at the level of abstract principle" (Conkin 1974, p. 52); Edmund S. Morgan, concludes that the American Revolution "confirmed and completed the subordination of government to the will of the people" (Morgan 1977, p. 101); Willi Paul Adams asserts that statements of the "principle" of the people's sovereignty "expressed the very heart of the consensus among the victors of 1776" (Adams 1980, p. 137). This was often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—the idea of the people as a sovereign—and had clear 17th- and 18th-century intellectual roots in English history.On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see: Reid 1986–1993, v. III, pp. 97–101, 107–110; Morgan 1988, passimPaul K. Conkin, Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers, (Indiana Univ. Press, 1974), at p. 52 (describing "the almost unanimous acceptance of popular sovereignty at the level of abstract principle"); Edmund S. Morgan, "The Problem of Popular Sovereignty," in Aspects of American Liberty: Philosophical, Historical and Political, (The American Philosophical Society, 1977), at p. 101 (concluding the American Revolution "confirmed and completed the subordination of government to the will of the people"); Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), at p. 137 (asserting that statements of the "principle" of the people's sovereignty "expressed the very heart of the consensus among the victors of 1776").
The concept unified and divided post-Revolutionary American thinking about government and the basis of the Union.This is the conclusion reached in Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2008) (In the prologue to this study, Fritz notes "In framing America's first constitutions, patriots celebrated the people's sovereignty. These ideas smoldered even after the Revolution ended and this heated revolutionary rhetoric soon permeated all regions and ranks of society. Government was no longer something that happened to people. In America it now became something the people—by their consent and volition—brought into being. The people gave their consent through their conduct and their active participation reinforced the message that the people were America's new sovereign." However, "Americans argued fiercely about the nature and the extent of their power as part of the collective sovereign, and seven decades later [after independence] they were no closer to agreement over what the people's sovereignty meant than they were during the Revolution.") Prologue, American Sovereigns, at p.l Questions were raised over its precise meaning, permissible actions and the will of a collective sovereign. In an argument echoed by his students, for example, historian Bernard Bailyn contended that early state jurisdiction over certain colleges had been done "in the name of the People...But who were the People? A handful of legislators?...But what was the State in a republican government? Should it have powers against the people themselves?"
Regarding slavery Between 1835 and 1845 the country became progressively more polarized over the issue of slavery. Debate focused on the extension of slavery: whether it would be permitted, protected, abolished, or perpetuated in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and Mexican Cession territories. Attempts to resolve the issue in Congress led to gridlock. Several Congressional leaders, in an effort to resolve the deadlock over slavery as a condition for admission or administration of the territories, searched for a middle ground.Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War, (University of North Carolina Press: 1997) at p. 78 (noting that congressional sexting over slavery in the territory acquired from Mexico had reached a "deadlock" and that Whig party was "unwilling to meet the problem head-on.") & at p. 84 (noting that in the face of "extreme solutions" to the slavery question in the territories, "moderates in both parties began to search for middle ground.")
To some moderates, slavery in the territories was not a matter for Congress to resolve; they argued that the people in each territory, like those in each American state, were the sovereigns thereof and should determine the status of slavery.Compromise of 1850#Henry Clay and Douglas draft compromise Popular sovereignty became part of the rhetoric for leaving to residents of the new American territories the decision to accept or reject slavery; this would resolve the expansion of slavery in the United States. This formed a middle ground between proponents of a limitation on slavery's spread to the territories and those opposing limitations, tying into the widespread American assumption that the people were sovereign.Stephen A. Douglas And The American Union (Website: University of Chicago Library) (May 14, 2008) ("Popular sovereignty had the potential for great public appeal because it was closely tied to the ideal of majority rule and the principles of American constitutionalism. For [Senator Stephen A.] Douglas, it had even more important political implications. By removing slavery from congressional debate and transferring it to geographically remote territorial legislatures, Douglas hoped to insulate the federal Union from further sectional conflict.")
According to historian Michael Morrison, the "idea of local self-determination, or, as it would become known, popular sovereignty" first began to occupy the attention of Congress in 1846 and 1847.Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War, at p. 84 (University of North Carolina Press: 1997) (noting that as a proposal for solving the question of slavery in the territories, "popular sovereignty endorsed the fundamental principle of self-government, [so that] its appeal was powerful. Of more immediate importance, Cass's [popular sovereignty] doctrine also held out the twin and seemingly paradoxical advantages of resolving the territorial issue and postponing its denouement. For although popular sovereignty proposed to remove this vexing question from Congress, Cass was as silent as the dumbest oracle on the precise stage of territorial development at which inhabitants were to regulate slavery.") In modern historiography, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas is most closely associated with popular sovereignty as a solution to the extension of slavery in the territories. Douglas's biographer, historian Robert W. Johannsen, wrote that Douglas was
chairman of the Committee on Territories in both the House and Senate, and he discharged the responsibilities of his position with single-minded devotion. ... During the debates over the organization of the Mexican Cession, Douglas evolved his doctrine of popular sovereignty, and from that time on it was irrevocably linked to his interest in the territories and in the West. His commitment to popular sovereignty was the deeper because he recognized in it a formula that would (he hoped) bridge the differences between the North and South on the slavery question, thus preserving the Union.Robert W. Johannsen, The Frontier, the Union and Stephen A. Douglas (Univ. of Illinois Press: 1989) at pp. 95–96