plore my enemies, who
so ruthlessly invade the private sanctuary, to do me the favor to
believe that I have no wish, no aspiration, to be considered purer or
better than she who was, or they who are, slaveholders."

He was of those who could be indifferent to the moral quality of
slavery. He could favor whatever policy the Constitution required, or
precedents favored, or public expediency demanded; if his enemies were
to be believed, he could take whatever course ambition and self-interest
impelled him to. Never once during his long wrestling with the slavery
question did he concede that any account should be taken of the moral
character of the institution, or intimate that he believed it wrong for
one man to hold another man in bondage.

The Democratic National Convention of 1848, though its platform was as
vague as it could be made, nominated a candidate who was committed to a
particular plan with slavery in the Territories. The candidate was Lewis
Cass, of Michigan, and his plan was set forth in a letter to one
Nicholson, of Nashville, Tennessee, of date December 24, 1847. The plan
appeared to be a very simple one. It was to leave the people of each
Territory, so soon as it should be organized, free to regulate their
domestic institutions as they chose. He favored it for two reasons:
first, because Congress had no right to interfere; and second, because
the people themselves were the best judges of what institutions they
ought to have. That was the barest form of the doctrine which its
opponents in derision named "squatter sovereignty." It was contrary to
the doctrine of the Wilmot Proviso, which invoked the authority of
Congress to exclude slavery from all the Territories, and contrary,
also, to whatever doctrine or no doctrine was implied in the motion to
extend the compromise line to the Pacific, exercising the authority of
Congress to exclude slavery north of the line and forbearing to exercise
it south of the line. It was equally contrary to a third doctrine which
was brought before the convention. William L. Yancey, a delegate from
Alabama, offered a resolution to the effect that neither Congress nor
any territorial legislature had any right to exclude slave property from
the Territories. This was a mild statement of the extreme Southern
doctrine that slaves were property, so recognized by the Constitution,
and that a slaveholder had the right to take his slaves anywhere but
into a State where slavery was forb