mot proviso "would be death to the war, death
to all hope of getting an acre of territory, death to the
administration, and death to the Democratic party." This was
thoroughly characteristic, and in perfect harmony with his action,
already referred to, respecting the Quintuple treaty; but it showed
how the political waters were being troubled by the slavery question,
and how impossible it was to accommodate the growing anti-slavery
feeling of the country by any shallow expedients.

But another conspiracy against freedom was now hatched; and if the
Senate had strangled the Wilmot proviso, it was gratifying to find
the House ready to strangle this monster of senatorial birth. I
allude to the now almost forgotten "Clayton Compromise," which
passed the Senate by a decided majority on the 26th of July. By
submitting the whole question of slavery in all our Territories to
the Supreme Court of the United States, as then constituted, it
would almost certainly have spawned the curse in all of them,
including Oregon, which had long been exposed to peril and massacre
by the reckless opposition of our slave-masters to a government
there without the recognition of slavery. The defeat of this
nefarious proposition, which was happily followed by the passage
of a bill giving Oregon a territorial government, is largely due
to Alexander H. Stephens, whose motion to lay it on the table in
the House prevailed by a small majority. In this action he had
the courage to separate himself from the great body of the leading
men of his own section; but in doing so he was prompted by his
supreme devotion to slavery. This he has since denied and labored
to explain in his private correspondence and published works, but
the record is fatally against him. He was unwilling to trust the
interests of the South in the hands of the Supreme Court, and his
speech of August 7th, in the House of Representatives, in defense
of his motion, gave very plausible reasons for his apprehensions;
but the Dred Scott decision of a few years later showed how completely
he misjudged that tribunal, and how opportunely his blindness came
to the rescue of freedom. It seems now to have been providential;
for in this Continental plot against liberty the superior sagacity
of Calhoun and his associates was demonstrated by subsequent events,
while Mr. Stephens, with his great influence in the South, could
almost certainly have secured its triumph if he had become its
cham