Prospect to the South that slavery would not be confined to a limited section of the country and thus a limited political power. To the North, it offered a seemingly principled way out of the political crisis short of abolition or secession.
<span>Popular sovereignty had the opposite effect: it polarized political opinion even more. </span>
Popular sovereignty in practice touched off something very close to a civil war in Kansas as pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions organized their own state constitutional conventions and led to wave of bushwhacking and political murders. Both North and South were surprised at the lengths the other would go to.
<span>The Dred Scott decision then repudiated Congress's right to decide the question of slavery in the territories and asserted that slavery ownership was only a property right that Congress had no right to interfere with in the territories. </span>
The Dred Scott decision seemed to killed the notion of popular sovereignty but the Supreme Court's logic was obvious. It was only a matter of time before the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that Congress or the states had no right to restrict slavery anywhere, including free states.
To the South, popular sovereignty was suspect because it was championed by a Northerner and so must be some clever stratagem to limit and extinguish slavery.
To the North, in spite of 60 years of political compromise designed to limit the practice of slavery, it looked set to spread not only through the western territories but into free states as well and there would be no legislative means to prevent it, much of credit being due to Stephen Douglas.
<span>Abraham Lincoln hammered at popular sovereignty in the Lincoln - Douglas debates. </span>
It can be used by to see how well people work together solving problems and discussing certain things as well as it identifying states that may need help such as problem identification and solution generation.
