| Popular sovereignty was as much gamble as triumph. It was one thing to ascribe sovereignty to an imagined people, as the Constitution's Preamble did, it was quite another to define, in concrete terms, what that sovereignty meant and who constituted this people. For the most part, the tricky problems popular sovereignty posed were sent to the states. There, two questions, who were the people? and, how did this people rule?, challenged even the most experienced politicians. The provisions that these questions corresponded to---suffrage, representation, and the structure of government---underwent steady debate in the constitutional conventions held at least once in every state in the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the onset of the Civil War. It was there that the idea of popular sovereignty was implemented, giving the people more power than ever over their governments through the election of all state officials and the limitation of legislative power.;Popular sovereignty's articulation during this period constituted the first imagining of democracy in the United States. Initially used in a positive sense in the 1790s to describe this new system of government in which the people ruled actively, "democracy," by the mid-nineteenth century, came for some in the North to mean more. Not only would democracy describe a system of popular rule, it would also call into question the compatibility of slavery with popular government. Others, primarily in the South, reacted differently, concluding that the democratic experiment had gone bad. Government had become too majoritarian, too popular. Their popular sovereignty protected minorities; it stood in opposition to the democracy of numbers, which many Southerners feared would try to abolish slavery. The coming of the Civil War was caused, in part, by these competing and mutually exclusive visions of popular sovereignty.;By the end of the War, the doubts about popular sovereignty's stability, which had plagued it since the Founding, had all but been erased. The War had been fought in democracy's name against an anti-democratic foe and the people rallied to the cause. Whereas once democracy tempted anarchy, it now not only secured liberty, it maintained order too. |
