Senator James H. Hammond of South Carolina was a major apologist for slavery in the years running up to the Civil War. Arguably his most famous address was delivered to the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1858, during the debate over the admission of Kansas to the Union and the legitimacy of the proslavery Lecompton Constitution in that state. The issue was one of popular sovereignty— that is, the right of the voters in a territory to determine whether the proposed state would be a free state or a slave state. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois opposed the new constitution, arguing that it was adopted only because of voter fraud. In the speech, Hammond extolled the institutions of the South, depicting it as a powerful empire where “Cotton is king.” The speech also became known as the “Mudsill” speech because of Hammond’s assertion that every society needed a lower class (the “mudsill”) to maintain the upper class. In America’s case, Black slaves were the mudsill.