mittee of thirteen was rejected by a vote of eighty-three to eighty. Mr. Clay, as chairman of a subsequent and much larger committee of the House, appointed in conjunction with a similar one from the Senate, made a report identical in substance with that he had reported as chairman of the committee of thirteen. Nowithstanding this, the resolution passed in the House by a vote of eighty-seven to eighty-one, in the Senate by a vote of twenty-six to fifteen; and on the 10th of August, 1821, the President proclaimed the admission of Missouri into the Union. Of the eighty-seven votes for this last resolution of Mr. Clay for her admission without the slavery restriction, only seventeen were from the North; about half of whom were among the fourteen who had voted against the state restriction on the 2d of March, 1820. Of the eighty-one who voted against her admission, eighty were from the North. Are these seventeen antirestrictionists to represent the party of restrictionists as in favor of the admission of Missouri, rather than the eighty restrictionists as against her admission? Are these seventeen Northern votes to represent the North on this occasion as in favor of the admission of Missouri, or the eighty to represent her as against it? Figures are said not to lie. If so, the truth which these proclaim is that, if the admission of Missouri without the restriction, was the consideration (which it never was) that the North was to pay the South for the Thomas territorial restriction, she certainly never paid it; and therefore her claim on the South to support it was forfeited within twelve months after the compact was made. In addition to the above facts, it may be here stated that those few Northern men, who voted against the restriction on the admission of Missouri, were promptly repudiated by their constituents, who disclaimed being bound by their acts to any political course in the future. This repudiation of their conduct was publicly proclaimed by both legislative and popular action. Indeed, public sentiment was so hostile that in different localities in New England they were burnt in effigy.

But independent of all such matters, the undeniable truth remains, that the only consideration pledged for the admission of Missouri, without the restriction, was the admission of Maine, a proposition so forcibly stated in the words quoted from Mr. Clay, as put by the Senate to the House. That proposition was accepted; the House accordingly, on the 2d of March, 1820, as we have shown, by a majority of three, passed the act for the admission of Missouri,

and promptly on the next day, the 3d of March, the Senate receded from its amendments to the Maine bill, which passed it through Congress. The result was, the representatives from Maine applied to Congress at its next session for the recognition of their state as a member of the Union, which was granted; the Senate concurring in fulfillment of its pledge. The representatives from Missouri, as we have seen, made a similar application; but their application was rejected by the House, in violation of its pledge, and on the pretext we have noticed. Maine, however, let it be said to her praise, completely vindicated her honor through her then noble representatives, in voting and doing all they could for the recognition of Missouri as a state, rightfully in the Union, in fulfillment of a sacred pledge, which they resolved to fulfill, though it had to be done under the fiery indignation of their constituents, and in the light of their own. burning effigies.

The same

In 1836, Arkansas applied to Congress for admission into the Union as a slave state. She had a right to be admitted as such, under the Missouri territorial compromise, being a part of the Louisiana territory, south of the line of 36° 30'. party of Restrictionists, constituting a majority of those from the North in the House, voted against her admission; denying the obligations of the compromise, or any responsibility whatever, on their part to comply with it. Mr. Adams offered the following amendment to the bill for her admission: "Nothing in this act shall be construed as an assent by Congress to the article of the constitution of the said state in relation to slavery, or the emancipation of slaves, etc."

Mr. Slade, of Vermont, offered also, a restriction against slavery, as an amendment to the bill. Mr. Cushing, of Massachusetts, in discussing the motion of Mr. Adams, alluding to the Mis"The state of Massachusetts was not a souri compromise, said: party to that compromise. She never, directly or indirectly, assented to it; most of her representatives who voted for it, were disavowed and denounced at home." Mr. Hard, of Massachusetts, said: "There was no compromise or compact, whereby Congress surrendered any power; if it had done so, it would be subject to repeal at the will of any succeeding Congress, etc." Such was the voice and such the action of Massachusetts and other New England states, in denouncing and repudiating the Missouri compromise on the admission of Arkansas into the Union.

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This same party with a like force and unanimity, in 1845, again repudiated the Missouri compromise, when, by an amendment to the resolution, annexing Texas, it was extended by Congress to the territory belonging to that state. They voted against this amendment, notwithstanding the fact that when the Missouri compromise act of 1820 was passed, this same territory was embraced by it as a part of Louisiana; at that time the cession of Texas not having been made to Spain by the Florida treaty.

On the 15th of January, 1847, when a bill for organizing a territorial government for Oregon was pending in the House, to that clause of it which excluded slavery, this amendment was moved: "Inasmuch as the whole of said territory lies north of 36° 30′ north latitude, known as the Missouri compromise line." The purpose of this was understood by all, to secure a test vote, to show who were for, and who against the recognition and continuance of that line as a division between the sections, and the amendment was rejected by a vote of one hundred and thirteen to eighty-two. All against it, were from the North, all for it, from the South, except six, of whom Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, was the leader. This bill failed to pass the Senate at that session.

After the acquisitions, from Mexico, of California, Utah and New Mexico, another bill for organizing a territorial government for Oregon, with a slavery restriction in it, was passed through the House. When it came before the Senate, Mr. Douglas moved to strike out the restriction, and that the Missouri compromise line be "declared to extend to the Pacific ocean, and be binding for the future organization of the territories of the United States, with the same understanding with which it was orginally adopted." This amendment was passed in the Senate by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-one; twenty-six of the thirty-three were from the South, and all of the twenty-one against it, were from the North. When this amendment came to the House, eighty-two voted for it-all from the South, except four-and one hundred and twenty-one against it, all from the North, except one. Oregon was a part of the Louisiana territory, so claimed in the negotiations with Great Britain, and in the discussions of our title to it in the Senate. The vote, therefore, of the North against the amendment to the first bill was an abrogation of the Missouri compromise, in its application to the very territory which it literally embraced, and in its application to

all the other territories, which by its spirit, (as asserted by Mr. Douglas in his amendment), it was intended to embrace.,

In view of such a narrative of events, unquestionably true, it appears there is no more indisputable fact recorded, and re-recorded in the annals of Congress and in the history of the country, than that the North, before the year 1850, had wholly abrogated the Missouri compromise, and refused to abide by it, either in its letter or spirit.

This compromise, thus broken and ignored, Mr. Douglas, and those who co-operated with him, no longer regarded as in existence or as a compact to be observed; but looking to another principle in harmony with the Constitution as a substitute for it, he and his fellow Democrats of the North, abandoned his own amendment to the Oregon bill, as a remedy wholly unavailable for settling permanently the slavery question in all the territories as its author had intended. The result was, the Senate receded from it, and the Oregon bill was passed.

"Do our

The proportion of the common territory allotted between the North and the South, by the Missouri compromise line, as passed in 1821, and proposed in 1848, may be inferred from the following statement. Mr. Kinsey, of New Jersey, one of the conference committee, said in 1820 while addressing the House: Southern brethren demand an equal division of this wide-spread fertile region (of Louisiana), this common territory, purchased with the common funds of the nation? No, with a magnanimity unparalleled, they have conceded to us nine-tenths of this great common property." Mr. Clayton, from Delaware, in 1848, said: "I obtained a statement from the land office. From that statement it appeared that if the (Missouri) line were extended to the Pacific, the free labor of the North would have the exclusive occupation of 1,600,000 square miles and the South, but 262,000.”

The compromise of 1850 was the work of Clay, Webster, Douglas and Cass, and most of the great American statesmen of that day. It embraced the admission of California, territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico; the settlement of the question of boundary with Texas; the rendition of fugitive slaves, and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The Missouri compromise having been abrogated, as we have seen, by the North, it was, therefore, considered by these great statesmen as out of the question. Independent of this consideration, Mr. Clay declared

the principle of it objectionable, and that it ought not to be adopted. The settlement of the territorial question made in 1850, amounted simply to this: That the principle of restriction by Congress should be entirely abandoned, and that all states hereafter formed, either north, or south of 36' 30', should come into the Union, "either with or without slavery, as their constitutions might prescribe." The bill, said Mr. Clay "has left the field open for both, to be occupied by slavery, if the people, when they are forming states, shall so decide; or to be exclusively devoted to freedom if they shall so determine." The New Mexico bill, as passed, embraced territory obtained from Mexico in 1848, and also territory obtained by the cession of Louisiana in 1803, to which the Missouri compromise had been applied, and which was north of 36° 30′; but this line, having been abandoned now by all parties, was treated as a nullity by this bill, which so far as it came in conflict with the compromise, swept the restriction as a dead letter from the statute book. The vote in the Senate on re-establishing this principle of no Congressional restriction in any of the territories, instead of the principle of division, was thirty-eight for and only twelve against it, twenty states for, and six against it. In the House, one hundred and eight for, and ninetyseven against it. This compromise of 1850 was afterwards approved by an overwhelming majority of the people North and South. The Democratic Convention of 1852 endorsed it. The Whig Convention of that year endorsed it, and bound themselves to adhere to it, to use their own language, inserted by Mr. Webster, "in principle and in substance." Mr. Pierce, the Democratic candidate that year, openly and heartily approved it. All the states in the Union, except four, voted for him as the chosen advocate of this compromise. For there was nothing of magnetism, either in his personal character or public reputation to attract to him apart from the question at issue, a vote of such magnitude.

In 1854, two delegates appeared at Washington from that portion of the Louisiana cession known as Kansas and Nebraska, with petitions to Congress for territorial governments. Mr. Douglas, as chairman of the Committee on Territories, was instructed to prepare, and report to the Senate, the measures asked for in these petitions. Accordingly, on the 23d of January, 1854, he reported the celebrated Kansas-Nebraska bill, as a substitute for the original Nebraska bill, reported by him on the 4th of January, and identical