r involuntary servitude therein. The vehement
discussion that ensued was continued into the first session of a
different Congress from that in which it originated, and agitated the
whole country during the interval between the two. It was the first
question that ever seriously threatened the stability of the Union, and
the first in which the sentiment of opposition to slavery in the
abstract was introduced as an adjunct of sectional controversy. It was
clearly shown in debate that such considerations were altogether
irrelevant; that the number of existing slaves would not be affected by
their removal from the older States to Missouri; and, moreover, that the
proposed restriction would be contrary to the spirit, if not to the
letter, of the Constitution.[7] Notwithstanding all this, the
restriction was adopted, by a vote almost strictly sectional, in the
House of Representatives. It failed in the Senate through the firm
resistance of the Southern, aided by a few patriotic and conservative
Northern, members of that body. The admission of the new State, without
any restriction, was finally accomplished by the addition to the bill of
a section for ever prohibiting slavery in all that portion of the
Louisiana Territory lying north of thirty-six degrees and thirty
minutes, north latitude, except Missouri--by implication leaving the
portion south of that line open to settlement either with or without
slaves.

This provision, as an offset to the admission of the new State without
restriction, constituted the celebrated Missouri Compromise. It was
reluctantly accepted by a small majority of the Southern members. Nearly
half of them voted against it, under the conviction that it was
unauthorized by the Constitution, and that Missouri was entitled to
determine the question for herself, as a matter of right, not of bargain
or concession. Among those who thus thought and voted were some of the
wisest statesmen and purest patriots of that period.[8]

This brief retrospect may have sufficed to show that the question of the
right or wrong of the institution of slavery was in no wise involved in
the earlier sectional controversies. Nor was it otherwise in those of a
later period, in which it was the lot of the author of these memoirs to
bear a part. They were essentially struggles for sectional equality or
ascendancy--for the maintenance or the destruction of that balance of
power or equipoise between North and South, which was early r