Compromise had been the policy of the country since the beginning. Now that policy was thrown to the winds. The Constitution itself was a compromise. It had contemplated the prohibition of the African slave trade, but to satisfy the interests involved it had forbidden Congress to stop it until the lapse of twenty years. The Ordinance of 1787 did not interfere with the spread of slavery into the Mississippi Valley of the South, but it forbade it forever in the Northwest Territory, a vast region stretching from the Ohio to the upper waters of the Mississippi. Following the purchase of the immense territory of Louisiana from France, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was devised. Missouri was to be admitted as a slave state, but slavery ever thereafter was to be excluded from the great plain lying between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains and above the parallel of 36° 30'. When the war with Mexico had brought another large addition to the national domain, the Compromise of 1850 was made. By this compromise the South agreed that California should be admitted as a free state, while the North conceded that all the rest of the newly acquired soil should be left unpledged either to freedom or to slavery, and at the same time it accepted the Fugitive Slave Act, an extreme measure which compelled the return of runaway slaves, who sought refuge within the borders of the free states. With the adoption of each of these historic compromises, the statesmen who made them united in congratulating the country on a happy solution of the vexed problem for all time. Both political parties joined in hailing the Compromise of 1850 as the end of the long feud between the sections. They agreed with one voice that the disturbing subject should be banished from discussion. At "There shall be no more agitation," Daniel Webster thundered. "We will have peace." the same time Henry Clay complimented the country on the acceptance of the Compromise everywhere "outside of Boston," while Douglas positively announced that he never would make another speech on the hateful subject of slavery. Lincoln was not in politics, but he adopted the opinion of the leaders of both parties at Washington that the question was settled. It was a problem, however, which never had shown any pity for the repose of the Union, and within three years it rose again, a spectre at the feast. The time had come for Congress to set up territorial governments in that part of the Louisiana Purchase lying west of the Missouri River. This was a tract of land four hundred and seventy-five thousand square miles in extent and all of it bore the common name of Nebraska. Less than a thousand white persons were scattered over that wild empire, which to-day includes the states of Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, and the two Dakotas, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. It lay almost wholly north of the line drawn in the Missouri Compromise, and by that act, slavery was excluded from its soil. The South now pointed out that the Compromise of 1850 had left the question of slavery or freedom to be decided by the people of the territories of Utah and New Mexico which were acquired in the Mexican War, and it demanded that Nebraska be treated in strict accordance with the true spirit of that Compromise. All the territory of the United States, the southern leaders insisted, belonged equally to the people, North and South, and Congress had no right to exclude from it the lawful property of any citizen, whether it be property in slaves or in horses. The chairman of the Senate committee in charge of the subject was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He had been a close second in the race for the Democratic nomination for President a little while before, and was aflame with desire for the nomina tion in the coming campaign. The South had the power to bestow or withhold the great prize which he sought. For a time Douglas hesitated. In the end he yielded to the voice of ambition and became the able champion of the repeal of that time-honored compact, the Missouri Compromise. He proposed, in the creation of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, to leave to the settlers, to the "popular sovereignty," as he pleasingly termed it, whether slavery should be adopted or forbidden on their soil, and he battled for his plan with the might of a "little giant," by which name his admirers delighted to speak of him. With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the agitation of the question of slavery ceased to be local to Boston, as Clay had flattered himself only four years before, and ceased to be confined to Massachusetts or New England. An outburst of passion swept the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as the people of the North, with the freshly printed pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" before them, saw the institution cast its dark shadow across the free plains of the far West. Douglas was for the moment bewildered by the storm of earnest protest. "This tornado," he exclaimed, "has been raised by Abolitionists and Abolitionists alone." Abolitionists, however, were |