he most concurred, had always contended that Congress had no
constitutional power to make the interdiction. But the people having
generally acquiesced, the matter was considered settled; and when
Texas, a slave-holding State, was admitted into the Union, Southern
men, regarding the Missouri Act as a compact, assented to the
extension of the line through the territory of Texas, with a provision
that any State formed out of the territory north of 36: 30: should be
non-slaveholding. But when, at a subsequent period, we made extensive
acquisitions from Mexico, and it was proposed to divide the territory
by the same parallel, the North generally opposed it, and after a long
discussion, the controversy was settled on the principle of
non-intervention by Congress in relation to property in the
territories. The line of the Missouri Compromise was repudiated. And a
Senator who had been most prominent in denouncing the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise as a violation of good faith on the part of the
South, in 1850, described it as a measure which had been the grave of
every Northern man who supported it, and objected to the boundary of
36: 30: for the territory of Utah, because of the political
implication which its adoption would contain.

The act having been thus signally repudiated by the denial in every
form of the power of Congress to fix geographical limits within which
slavery might or might not exist; when it became necessary to organize
the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, it was but the corollary of
the proposition which had been maintained in 1850 to repeal the act
which had fixed the parallel of 36: 30: as the future limit of slavery
in the territory of Louisiana.

Consistency demanded so much; fairness and manhood could not have
granted less. He was not then a member of Congress; but if he had