ect, replied in such a way that
all radical defenders of slavery, both national leaders and local
politicians, were moved to unite for his political defeat.

David R. Atchison, junior Senator from Missouri, had been made the
leader of the pro-slavery forces. The defeat of Benton in the Missouri
Legislature did not end the strife. He at once became a candidate for
Atchison's place in the election which was to occur in 1855, and he was
in the meantime elected to the House of Representatives in 1852. The
most telling consideration in Benton's favor was the general demand, in
which he himself joined, for the immediate organization of the western
territory in order to facilitate the building of a system of railways
reaching the Pacific, with St. Louis as the point of departure. For a
time, in 1859, and 1853, Benton was apparently triumphant, and Atchison
was himself willing to consent to the organization of the new territory
with slavery excluded. The national leaders, however, were not of the
same mind. The real issue was the continuance of slavery in the
State; the one thing which must not be permitted was the transfer of
anti-slavery agitation to the separate States. Henry Clay's proposal
of 1849 to provide for gradual emancipation in Kentucky was bitterly
resented. It had long been an axiom with the slavocracy that the
institution would perish unless it had the opportunity to expand. Out of
this conviction arose Calhoun's famous theory that slaveowners had under
the Constitution an equal right with the owners of all other forms of
property in all the Territories. The theory itself assumed that the act
prohibiting slavery in the territory north of the southern boundary
of Missouri was unconstitutional and void. But this theory had not yet
received judicial sanction, and the time was at hand when the question
of freedom or slavery in the western territory was to be determined.
Between March and December, 1853, the discovery was made that the Act
of 1850 organizing the Territories of New Mexico and Utah had superseded
the Compromise of 1820; that a principle had been recognized applicable
to all the Territories; that all were open to settlement on equal terms
to slaveholders and non-slaveholders; that the subject of slavery should
be removed from Congress to the people of the Territories; and that they
should decide, either when a territorial legislature was organized or
at the time of the adoption of a constitution preparat