Popular sovereignty over slavery in the territories

Popular sovereignty over slavery in the territories is a political principle invoked in the novel to justify letting residents of a territory decide whether slavery may exist there. Its force lies in the gap between its universal language of popular choice and the racial limits placed on who counts as part of “the people”: the doctrine sounds democratic while protecting the interests of those who already hold power.

The principle in political debate

At a dinner hosted by Lavinia Duke, a senator uses the gathering as a platform to argue that the inhabitants of each state or territory should make their own decisions about slavery, and that the government should not decide the question for them. The table answers him with applause. His formulation makes local self-government appear to be the governing standard, shifting responsibility for slavery from national authority to territorial choice.

The senator’s position is compromised by the facts that he leaves unspoken: his wife owns a cotton plantation with one hundred enslaved people, and he receives income as its manager. His rhetoric about popular decision-making therefore sits alongside direct financial benefit from slavery. The principle does not appear as an abstract constitutional puzzle; it is spoken in a room where political influence, wealth, and the institution supposedly left to local choice are closely connected.

The racial boundary of “the people”

The narrative identifies the exclusion embedded in the senator’s language. Although he repeatedly invokes “the will of the people,” he means the will of white people; another of his declared positions is that the Constitution was made by whites for whites. His account of popular sovereignty thus restricts political authority by race even as it presents itself as the voice of local self-determination. The applause at the dinner registers how readily the argument can pass as common political sense when the people excluded from its promises are not treated as participants.

This exclusion resonates with the novel’s wider depictions of colonial power, without making territorial popular sovereignty and the dispossession of Indigenous people identical political questions. French authorities describe Mi’kmaq people as useful as fighters while taking their country, and settlers’ accounts frame the clearing and destruction of wilderness as progress. In a later dispute over René Sel’s property, a claim grounded in a colonial title and inheritance is used to deny the Sel family’s competing claim of kinship. Across these episodes, the novel repeatedly asks who is recognized as a legitimate holder of land, rights, and political voice.

Narrative significance

The senator’s dinner speech shows how democratic language can conceal rather than resolve a conflict over power. Local choice is presented as a neutral rule, but the novel makes the rule’s limits visible: the senator’s household profits from enslavement, and his definition of the public excludes Black people. The scene therefore exposes popular sovereignty not as an even-handed transfer of authority to everyone affected, but as an argument whose apparent universality depends on deciding in advance whose choices count.