very
imaginable grade of opinion. The prevailing view of opponents of
slavery, however, was in harmony with their past conduct and maintained
that Congress had complete control over slavery in the Territories.

When the Mexican territory was acquired, Stephen A. Douglas, as the
experienced chairman of the Committee on Territories in the Senate, was
already developing a theory respecting slavery in the Territories
which was destined to play a leading part in the later crusade against
slavery. Douglas was the most thoroughgoing of expansionists and would
acknowledge no northern boundary on this side of the North Pole, no
southern boundary nearer than Panama. He regarded the United States,
with its great principle of local autonomy, as fitted to become
eventually the United States of the whole world, while he held it to be
an immediate duty to make it the United States of North America. As the
son-in-law of a Southern planter in North Carolina, and as the father
of sons who inherited slave property, Douglas, although born in Vermont,
knew the South as did no other Northern statesman. He knew also the
institution of slavery at first hand. As a pronounced expansionist
and as the congressional leader in all matters pertaining to the
Territories, he acquired detailed information as to the qualities of
these new possessions, and he spoke, therefore, with a good degree of
authority when he said, "If there was one inch of territory in the whole
of our acquisitions from Mexico where slavery could exist, it was in the
valleys of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin." But this region was at
once preempted for freedom upon the discovery of gold.

Douglas did not admit that even the whole of Texas would remain
dedicated to slavery. Some of the States to be formed from it would be
free, by the same laws of climate and resources which determined that
the entire West would remain free. Before the Mexican War the Senator
had become convinced that the extension of slavery had reached its
limit; that the Missouri Compromise was a dead letter except as a
psychological palliative; that Nature had already ordained that slave
labor should be forever excluded from all Western territory both north
and south of that line. His reply to Calhoun's contention that a balance
must be maintained between slave and free States was that he had plans
for forming seventeen new States out of the vast Western domains, every
one of which would be free. And beside