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What if Stephen A Douglas died in 1857? (His hard-drinking lifestyle was not calculated to promote longevity, and we'll say it catches up with him a few years earlier than in OTL.)

What makes the time of death important is the issue of Kansas. Kansas' pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/kansas-constitutions/16532 rather easily passed the US Senate (33-25) and came close to passing even the northern-dominated House: the Crittenden-Montgomery Amendment providing for resubmission of the constitution to a popular vote, passed the House by only 120-112. (Eventually, the deadlock between the Senate and House was resolved by a compromise, the so-called English bill, allowing for resubmission of the constitution under the guise of a referendum on land grants; the result was that the constitution was overwhelmingly rejected and Kansas remained a territory until early 1861.)

Now suppose Stephen Douglas had died sometime in 1857, before Lecompton became an issue. In OTL his opposition to Lecompton was crucial in getting other northern Democrats to oppose it. No doubt *some* of them would have opposed it anyway (despite the pressure Buchanan exercised through his patronage power), either on principle or because they knew that if they supported it they would very likely be defeated by Republicans in 1858--but if Douglas affected even a few votes, this could have been decisive, given the narrowness of the vote in the House. (At the very least, the example of Douglas made it easier to oppose Lecompton without being seen as an "abolitionist.")

So let's say that without Douglas, the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution passes both houses of Congress. Kansas is admitted to the Union, and at least nominally it is "as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina" in Buchanan's notorious words. https://books.google.com/books?id=BZIftd0Ip0IC&pg=PA130 Yet it has very few slaves, and both houses of the legislature are in the hands of Free State men. One of the most obnoxious provisions of the Lecompton Constitution is that it provided that it could not be amended for seven years, so theoretically there is no way to abolish slavery in Kansas for some time to come. [1] OTOH, theoretically slavery was legal in the *territory* of Kansas after Lecompton was rejected in OTL (thanks to the Dred Scott decision) but in practice it was excluded, not necessarily because of "soil and climate" (after all, parts of eastern Kansas were not too dissimilar in these respects from parts of Missouri with considerable numbers of slaves) but because bringing slaves to territories controlled by free-soilers was just too risky. Presumably this could also be true of Kansas as a "slave" state--provided of course that the pro-free soil legislature would have been allowed to function, and that it would in fact function while accepting (at least nominally) a constitution it hated--in short, provided that Kansas would not start to "bleed" again. This was by no means guaranteed:

"Well authenticated evidence of 'a deeply laid plot to assassinate' is lacking, but there is no gainsaying the fact that the feeling at that time was bitter enough to have resulted in assassination, had Congress passed an act for the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution. Martin F. Conway, in a public address, took the position that Congress could make a state, but not the constitution of that state. That power was vested solely in the people. T. D. Thacher, William A. Phillips, J. M. Walden and Charles A. Foster expressed themselves in a similar vein. Gen. James H. Lane went farther and solemnly declared that no government should ever be organized, or even an attempt to organize under the Lecompton constitution. Thomas Ewing, Jr., a conservative free-state man, afterward the first chief justice of the state supreme court, wrote to his father in Ohio, under date of Jan. 18, 1858, that there were not over 1,000 of the 16,000 voters then in the territory interested in the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution, and that this 1,000 consisted of 'the ruffians who figured conspicuously in the arsons and murders of the first two years and who have not yet died of delirium tremens.' He also said: 'I belive that the ringleaders of this faction will be put to death the moment that Calhoun decides the election against us, and it is more than probable that they (the people) will seize the state government by killing enough of the pro-slavery men to give them a majority.'" http://www.ksgenweb.com/archives/1912/c/constitutions.html

Even if there was no revival of violence in Kansas, and the "conservative" free state men (who were willing to accept office under Lecompton and to pledge to enforce it) came to power, the whole matter would still weaken the Democrats in the North in 1858. The party would be more united--but more northern Democrats would be vulnerable to charges that they were tools of the "slave power." (And Buchanan, rather than being magnanimous in victory, would as in OTL probably try to defeat anti-Lecompton Democrats.)

As for 1860 the Democrats may be more united than in OTL--without Douglas as a hate-figure for the South and the Buchananites (instead, Democrats of all sections and factions claim to revere Douglas' memory) and assuming Kansas has been peaceful, the choice of a candidate seems easier--except that the issue of a slave code for the territories could still be divisive. But in OTL southern Democrats insisted on a slave-code plank (at least one calling for a federal slave code "if necessary") partially as a weapon against the hated Douglasites. They might be more willing to compromise on the platform language in this TL, though after Harpers Ferry there will still be pressure for something going beyond the language of the 1856 platform or a mere declaration of loyalty to the *Dred Scott* decision (which after all could be interpreted in different ways--even without Douglas some northern Democrats will try to argue *Dred Scott* is compatible with popular sovereignty).

I'm not sure who Douglas' successor in the Senate will be--the Illinois legislature was controlled by Democrats in 1857 [2] In any event, any interim Democratic Senator chosen will likely be weaker than Douglas in 1858, so we could see Lincoln win the Senate race that year. Incidentally, Lincoln may not make the "house divided" speech in this ATL--it was largely directed against Douglas, and designed to convince Republicans that they could not trust Douglas, despite his opposition to Lecompton. With any other Democrat, I doubt that the Republicans will need this reminder.

[1] Furthermore, the constitution also provided that *even in 1864* the constitution could not be amended so as to "affect the rights of property in the ownership of slaves." So theoretically, even in 1864 Kansas, though it might ban *additional* slaves from entering the state, could not emancipate those already there, or for that matter their descendants. After all, "The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave *and its increase* is the same, and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever." http://www.multied.com/documents/Lecompton.html (emphasis added) If one is to take this literally, Kansas would *forever* be prohibited from emancipating any descendant of any slave in the state from 1857 to 1864. Of course this raises the problem of whether you can ever make a constitutional provision truly unamendable.

[2] The Democrats in the legislature even argued that Republican governor-elect William Bissell was ineligible for the governorship: "They insisted that because Bissell accepted a challenge to a duel he was constitutionally ineligible to be governor. The oath of office for the governor of Illinois included the provision that the governor-elect had not fought a duel or accepted the challenge to a duel. Bissell insisted that the incident with Senator Jefferson Davis was not a formal challenge, and Davis corroborated Bissell's account." http://www.lib.niu.edu/1994/ihy940463.html
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