Freeport Doctrine

Freeport Doctrine, position stated by Democratic U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas that settlers in a U.S. territory could circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision—which held that neither states nor territories were empowered to make slavery illegal—simply by failing to provide for police enforcement of the rights of slave owners to their slaves. The doctrine was first presented during the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in Freeport, Illinois, on August 27, 1858.

Douglas was elected as a U.S. Representative from Illinois in 1843, and three years later he successfully ran for the Senate. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, he was deeply involved in the bitter debate about whether slavery should be extended westward into the new territories. He developed the theory of popular sovereignty, which held that residents of a territory (rather than Congress) had the right to decide whether to permit slavery. At the time of his election, the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had allowed Maine to enter the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, banned slavery in the remaining part of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′.

The Compromise of 1850, proposed by Senator Henry Clay, allowed California, which straddled that boundary line but was west of the Louisiana Purchase, to enter the Union as a free state. It also established the new territories of Utah and New Mexico under charters that were silent as to the issue of slavery, thus allowing their legislatures to determine whether they would become slave or free states. Douglas then introduced what became the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This legislation extended to Kansas and Nebraska, previously required by the Missouri Compromise to ban slavery, the right to choose for themselves whether to allow slavery. Abolitionists saw this as a step backward, and the new law resulted in near civil war in Kansas. In addition, antislavery leaders established the Republican Party partly in response to the 1854 act. The law was overturned, however, by the Dred Scott decision, handed down in 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled that no African American could be a citizen of the United States and that the Constitution does not allow a state or territory to ban slavery.

Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate contesting Douglas’s reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1858, suggested a series of debates. At Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas to reconcile the Dred Scott decision with his preferred policy of popular sovereignty. Douglas responded that territories could effectively ban slavery by failing to make laws that supported it—the Freeport Doctrine:

It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature, and if the people are opposed to slavery they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. If, on the contrary, they are for it, their legislation will favor its extension.

While Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had infuriated Northern Democrats who were opposed to the spread of slavery, his Freeport Doctrine was acceptable to many Northern Democrats. However, it angered those in the South who favoured the continuation of slavery. Although Douglas was returned to the Senate in 1858, his stature as leader of the increasingly divided Democratic Party was diminished, and the Freeport Doctrine played a role in the ascendancy of the antislavery Republican Party and in Douglas’s loss to Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860.