quired, and then leave the struggle over the acquisition to result as it might. Many in the slave states, on the other hand, while favoring the acquisition, contended that neither North nor South could rightly claim as an exclusive field for its industrial and social organization the ground that had been won by a common expenditure of money and of blood.1

Several different solutions were offered for the problem concerning the expansion of slavery that was thus taking shape. One consisted in the Wilmot Proviso, but its impracticability had been clearly demonstrated before New Mexico and California were acquired. Another proposed the old expedient of geographical division, employed in 1820, in the days before the abolition movement, when nationalization had not gone so far, and also applied in the annexation of Texas. If such a settlement could prevail at all, it would involve the extension to the Pacific of the line of 36° 30', dividing free soil from that where slavery might exist; and the result would be to separate the new acquisitions into two unequal parts, from the larger of which slavery should be excluded. Since the South had obtained so small a share of the Louisiana purchase, it seemed to be extremely moderate for her to content herself with a like meagre allotment in the southwest; nevertheless, many southerners wished to extend the compromise line, and among them

1 Cong. Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 453, App., 90, 160, 367.

was the president himself, who had the unanimous concurrence of his cabinet.1

Polk, however, favored such a compromise mainly in order to quiet the agitation of the subject. He told Senator Crittenden that "the question of slavery would probably never be a practical one if we acquired New Mexico and California, because there would be but a narrow ribbon of territory south of the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30′, and in it slavery would probably never exist." It should be remembered that in the successive compromises based on the principle of division of territory the slave - holding interests had agreed that slavery should be excluded from states formed north of the line of 36° 30′-except Missouri — if only those formed below it should be given their option as to whether they would have slaves or not; it was therefore theoretically possible for free states to be formed below the compromise line.

Another suggestion was that Congress should provide for the organization of territorial governments for New Mexico and California, but should prohibit the legislatures of those territories from passing any law on the subject of slavery, and should leave the questions connected with it to be decided by the territorial judiciary. Calhoun would have preferred that the decision should be without appeal to the supreme court of the United States, but was

1 Polk, MS. Diary, January 16, 1847.

Ibid., January 23, 1847.

willing, for the sake of a judicial settlement, to give up his preference.1

Finally came the most important of all the proposed solutions, that of leaving the question of slavery altogether to local determination. Inasmuch as this method involved settlement by local action before the territorial status had given way to statehood, it was derisively termed "squatter sovereignty." The principle appealed strongly to the political instincts of the West, and there were many throughout the Union who were tired of the agitation over slavery and were willing to try a plan which promised to localize it and to relieve the national government of all responsibility as to the expansion of the system. The earliest suggestions of this method came in 1847,2 and it was doubtless born of the discussions of the Wilmot Proviso. December 14, 1847, Dickinson of New York introduced resolutions in the Senate affirming the doctrine; and on December 29 Cass approved it in a letter to A. O. P. Nicholson of Nashville. Doug

las afterwards became the great champion of the doctrine, and it has been associated especially with his name, but he was not its author.4 Though the Democrats in 1848 refused it a place in their plat

1 Polk, MS. Diary, July 17 and 19, 1848.

2 See remarks of Leake, February 15, 1847, in Cong. Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 444.

Niles' Register, LXXIII., 293; Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 1 Sess., 25. See Smith, Parties and Slavery (Am. Nation, XVIII.), chap.

form, it nevertheless soon became the very core of Democratic policy. Calhoun, however, and his followers repudiated it, declaring that the power to legislate for the territories was vested in Congress, and that the people of a territory had no power to abolish slavery.1

2

After the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso as an amendment to the "Three Million" bill, February 7, 1847, the next important struggle relative to the westward extension of slavery took place over Oregon. It was becoming gravely important that a territorial government be framed for the region to which the compromise with Great Britain in 1846 had given the United States undisputed possession. The president urged it, first in his special message of August 5, 1846, transmitting the convention agreed upon with Great Britain; then in his annual messages in 1846 and 1847; and finally in another special message of May 29, 1848, transmitting a petition from the authorities of the Oregon provisional government, asking the aid and protection of the United States.3

To the recommendations of the president the House responded with a bill for a territorial organization, passed January 16, 1847, which excluded slavery from Oregon, not directly by the use of a proviso similar to Wilmot's, but indirectly by repeating the restrictions of the Northwest Ordinance. 'See p. 171, above.

1 Calhoun, Works, IV., 563-568. Gray, Oregon, 542-547.

These restrictions were inherited by the territories and states formed out of the territory northwest of the Ohio, one of them being Michigan. An act of Congress of June 28, 1834, extended the boundary of Michigan territory westward so as to include nearly all the unorganized part of the Louisiana purchase lying east of the Missouri River, and the restrictions of the ordinance followed this expansion of Michigan and reappeared in the organization of the territories of Iowa and Minnesota without a protest; indeed, slavery was already excluded from the added district by the Missouri Compromise, if not by the laws of nature. One more westward step for the ordinance would include Oregon, and the framers of the Oregon bill now avoided the unpopular proviso which had been invented to check the expansion of slavery in the South, and fell back upon the older precedent of the measure which had stopped its progress in the North. The difference was largely in sentiment, but sentiment was highly important. Burt of South Carolina, who still clung to the principle of division, offered an amendment giving as a reason for the exclusion of slavery from Oregon the fact that all the territory lay north of the Missouri Compromise line;1 but the House, by a vote of 82 to 113, refused to adopt this explanation.

In the Senate this bill was tabled, and a Senate bill for the organization of the territory was checked 1 Cong. Globe, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., 178.