about and refused her admission.

Thus another issue was

added to the grave questions growing out of slavery. After long debate, Mr. Clay, who had carried through Congress the Missouri Compromise, reported a series of measures by which he and his associates hoped to settle the slavery agitation. California was to be admitted as a free state. Territorial governments were to be established in New Mexico and Utah, without attaching to them the proviso excluding slavery. The claim of Texas to nearly ninety thousand square miles of territory north of 36°, 30′, and thus made free by the Missouri Compromise, was to be recognized, and slavery extended over it. Ten millions of dollars were to be paid to Texas for her relinquishment of New Mexico. The slave trade was to be abolished at the national capital, but a new fugitive slave law, cruel and stringent in its provisions, was to be enacted.

These measures, by a combination of the leaders of both great parties, were finally forced through Congress. Mr. Webster made them the occasion of his celebrated 7th of March speech, and now the leaders said: "There shall be no more agitation, these measures are a finality, and we will have peace," and they drew up and signed a paper declaring this, and pledging one another to oppose any man who should not so regard them. But they soon learned that the conflict between slavery and freedom was irrepressible, inevitable, and must go on until one or the other should triumph. In this Lincoln was wiser than Webster, and more sagacious than Clay, who in early life had been his great leader.

CHAPTER VII.

THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS.

STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS.- REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE. THE Nebraska BILL.-CONDITION OF MATTERS IN KANSAS.- - LINCOLN COMES FORWARD AS THE CHAMPION of FreeDOM.-SPEECHES AT SPRINGFIELD AND PEORIA.- ELECTION OF TRUMBULL TO THE UNITED STATES SENate.

THE 33d Congress convened December 5th, 1853. The election of 1852 had resulted in the choice of Franklin Pierce as President, General Scott, the whig candidate, receiving the votes of only four states. The celebrated compromise measures of 1850, already described, were, it was claimed, endorsed by the election of Pierce, and the leaders of the slavery party boasted that the slavery question was settled, and that the abolitionists and agitators were crushed to rise no more. The territory out of which the great states of Kansas and Nebraska were to grow, was then becoming settled, and the people were asking for the organization of territorial governments. Throughout all this territory, slavery had been prohibited by the time-honored Missouri Compromise.

The great senatorial leaders, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton, had left the theatre of their renown. In the Senate there were three only, who were distinctly anti-slavery men, or "free soilers," as they were called-Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase and John P. Hale. Edward Everett occupied the seat of Webster, William H. Seward was the leader of the anti-slavery whigs, but perhaps the most prominent

figure then in the Senate was the young and ambitious member from Illinois, Stephen Arnold Douglas.

Douglas was then not quite forty years old, but had already become the idol of his party, and was then in the zenith of his popularity. He had had a brilliant career in Illinois in the House of Representatives, and since his election to the Senate in 1847, had been constantly rising in influence and power. He was especially the favorite of the young democracy, who looked upon him as certain, and at no distant day, of the presidency. He had a frank, open, cordial, familiar manner; at the same time he was bold, decided, and magnetic, possessing the qualities which made a popular leader in a degree hardly surpassed by any other man in American history.

Possessed of a retentive memory, without being a scholar and without much study, by conversation and otherwise, his mind had become well stored with practical knowledge, and he was well informed in regard to the history and politics of the country. He did not forget anything he had ever read or seen or heard, and he had the happy faculty, so useful to the politician, of always remembering faces and names. His resources were fully at his command, so that he was always ready. Although he lacked humor and wit, yet as a speaker he had few equals, either in the Senate or on the stump. He had great fluency; he seized the strong points of his case, and enforced them with much vigor. His denunciation and invective were extremely powerful.

He was chairman of the Committee on Territories, and now had the audacity to introduce, in his bill organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, a provision respecting the prohibition of slavery. The proposition started the people of the free states like the fire-bell at midnight, and opened again the question of slavery, with a violence and bitterness never before equalled. The motives which led Douglas to introduce this measure were denounced with the greatest severity. He was accused of being bribed by the promise of the presidency to break down this barrier against

the extension of slavery. It was charged that the leaders of the slavery party dazzled his eyes and bewildered his judgment by holding up to his eager ambition the White House. But whatever his motives, the act was political suicide to him and to slavery itself; it was the beginning of the end. From that time on, the conflict raged with ever increasing force, until slavery was destroyed in the flames which itself had kindled. It must be conceded that Douglas carried on the conflict with a nerve and vigor, a courage and ability, worthy of a nobler cause.

Senators Seward, Chase, Sumner, and Hale led the opposition to the bill. The speech of Mr. Seward against it was able, calm, and philosophic. After an historical review of the whole question, he spoke of the uselessness of all efforts to stifle the love of liberty and hatred of slavery. "You may," said he, "drive the slavery question out of these halls to-day, but it will revisit them to-morrow. You buried the Wilmot proviso here in 1850, and here it is again to-day, stalking through these halls in complete armor." "Slavery," he continued, "is an eternal struggle between truth and error, right and wrong." * "You may

*

*

*

sooner, by act of Congress, compel the sea to suppress its upheavings, and the earth to extinguish its internal fires, than oblige the human mind to cease its inquiries, and the human heart to desist from its throbbings." In its last maddened throes, this early, able champion of liberty was struck down by the hand of slavery, the same hand which assassinated Lincoln, but not until he had lived as Secretary of State, officially to proclaim, that "slavery no longer exists" in the republic.

said:

At five o'clock, on the 3d of March, 1854, the Nebraska bill passed the Senate. On its passage, Senator Seward "The shifting sands of compromise are passing from under my feet." With characteristic hopefulness, he exclaimed: "Through all the darkness and gloom of the present hour, bright stars are breaking that inspire me with hope, and excite me to persevere." Sam Houston, of Texas,

was one of the two senators from the slave states, who voted against the bill.' In concluding his speech against it, Houston said: "Yon proud symbol" (pointing to the eagle), "above your head remains enshrouded in black, as if deploring the misfortune that has fallen upon us, or as a fearful omen of the future calamities which await our nation in the event that this bill becomes a law."

In the House of Representatives, the struggle over the passage of the bill was renewed with still greater violence. During the struggle the House remained in continuous session for more than thirty-four hours. Colonel Benton, then a member of the House, and representing St. Louis, vigorously opposed the bill. Having gone out for refreshments, he was, on a call of the House, arrested and brought to the bar by the sergeant-at-arms, to offer an excuse for his absence. The venerable old man said: "It was neither on * ** account of age nor infirmity that I was absent." "I went away animus revertandi, intending to return, refreshed and invigorated, and take my share and sit it out; to tell the exact truth, to husband some strength for a pinch when it should come, for I did not think we had got to the tightest place."

Benton was indignant at the violation of the compact; he saw the danger which would follow, and resisted with all the ability and pluck of his best days.'

On the 8th of May, 1854, the bill finally passed the House. Salvos of artillery from Capitol Hill announced the triumph of the slave power, but the boom of these cannon awakened echoes and aroused the people, filling them with indignation, in every valley and on every hillside in the free states. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise shocked the moral sense, and was everywhere regarded in the free

1. John Bell, of Tennessee, was the other.

2. I am indebted to my late colleague in Congress, the Hon. E. B. Washburne, for much of the material and language of the account of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He was an able and fearless actor in these exciting scenes, and has written a most graphic sketch of them.-Author.