<P> By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal control in the territories, and they all claimed they were sanctioned by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly . The first of these "conservative" theories, represented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise apportionment of territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become a Constitutional mandate . The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view . </P> <P> The second doctrine of Congressional preeminence, championed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind legislators to a policy of balance--that slavery could be excluded in a territory as it was done in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 at the discretion of Congress, thus Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it . The Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846 . </P> <P> Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine of territorial or "popular" sovereignty--which asserted that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter . The Kansas--Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine . In Kansas Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery violence and political conflict erupted; the congressional House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission in the Senate was delayed until January 1861, after the 1860 elections when southern senators began to leave . </P> <P> The fourth theory was advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, one of state sovereignty ("states' rights"), also known as the "Calhoun doctrine", named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun . Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self - government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the Federal Union under the U.S. Constitution . "States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority . As historian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of federal power ." These four doctrines comprised the major ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the territories and the U.S. Constitution prior to the 1860 presidential election . </P>

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