lic domain of the United States.

No previous anti-slavery excitement bore any comparison with that
which spread over the North as the discussion progressed, and
especially after the bill became a law. It did not merely call
forth opposition; it produced almost a frenzy of wrath on the part
of thousands and tens of thousands in both the old parties, who
had never before taken any part whatever in anti-slavery agitation.
So conservative a statesman as Edward Everett, who had succeeded
John Davis as senator from Massachusetts, pointed out the fallacy
not to say the falsehood of the plea that the Compromise measures
of 1850 required or involved this legislation. This plea was an
afterthought, a pretense, contradicted by the discussion of 1850
in its entire length and breadth. In the North, conservative men
felt that no compromise could acquire weight or sanction or
sacredness, if one that had stood for a whole generation could be
brushed aside by partisan caprice or by the demands of sectional
necessity. The popular fury was further stimulated by the fact
that from the territory included in the Louisiana purchase, three
slave States had been added to the Union, and as yet only one free
State; and that the solemn guaranty securing all the domain north
of 36 deg. 30' was now to be trodden under foot when its operation was
likely to prove hostile to slavery and favorable to freedom. From
the beginning of the government the slave-holding interest had
secured the advantage in the number of States formed from territory
added to the original Union. The South had Louisiana, Arkansas,
and Missouri out of the purchase from France in 1803, Florida from
the purchase from Spain in 1819, and Texas, with its possibility
of being divided into four additional States, from the annexation
of 1845. The North had only Iowa from the Louisiana purchase and
California from the territory ceded by Mexico. The North would
not stop to consider its prospective advantages in the territory
yet to be settled, while the South could see nothing else. The
South realized that although it had secured five States and the
North only two, Southern territory was exhausted, while the creation
of free States in the North-West had just begun. Stripped of all
the disguises with which it was surrounded by the specious cry of
non-intervention by Congress, the majority in the North came to
see that it was in reality nothing but a struggle between the slave
S