ar; and the truculent and triumphant slave power dominating,
the State at last succeeded, through the coercion of commercial
interests, in defeating him even in the citadel of loyalty. He tried
once more to breast the tide that had borne down his fortunes. He became
a candidate for governor in 1856; but, though he disclaimed anti-slavery
sentiments, and supported James Buchanan for President against Fremont,
his son-in-law, he was defeated by Trusten Polk, who soon passed from
the gubernatorial chair to Benton's seat in the United States Senate,
from which he was, in course of time, to be expelled. Benton retired to
private life, only to labor more assiduously in compiling historical
evidences against the fast ripening treason of the times.

The Missouri senator was no longer in the way of the Southern oligarchs.
A shaft feathered by his own hands--the doctrine of instructions--had
slain him.

But yet another obstacle remained. The Missouri Compromise lifted a
barrier to the expansion of the Calhoun idea of free government, having
African slavery for its corner-stone. This obstacle was to be removed.
Missouri furnished the prompter and agent of that wrong in David E.
Atchison, for many years Benton's colleague in the Senate. Atchison was
a man of only moderate talents, of dogged purpose, willful, wholly
unscrupulous in the employment of the influences of his position, and
devoid of all the attributes and qualifications of statesmanship. He was
a fit representative of the pro-slavery fanaticism of his State; had
lived near the Kansas line; had looked upon and coveted the fair lands
of that free territory, and resolved that they should be the home and
appanage of slavery. It is now a part of admitted history, that this
dull but determined Missouri senator approached Judge Douglas, then
chairman of the Committee on Territories, and, by some incomprehensible
influence, induced that distinguished senator to commit the flagrant and
terrible blunder of reporting the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with a clause
repealing the Missouri Compromise, and thus throwing open Kansas to the
occupation of slavery. That error was grievously atoned for in the
subsequent hard fate of Judge Douglas, who was cast off and destroyed by
the cruel men he had served. Among the humiliations that preceded the
close of this political tragedy, none could have been more pungent to
Judge Douglas than the fact that Atchison, in a drunken harangue from
the tail o