the United States so stupid as not to see, at this
moment, that such a thing was wholly unnecessary, and that it was only
calculated to irritate and to offend. I am not one who is disposed to
create irritation, or give offence among brethren, or to break up
fraternal friendship, without cause. The question was accordingly left
legally open, whether slavery should or should not go to New Mexico or
Utah. There is no slavery there, it is utterly impracticable that it
should be introduced into such a region, and utterly ridiculous to
suppose that it could exist there. No one, who does not mean to deceive,
will now pretend it can exist there.

Well, Gentlemen, we have a race of agitators all over the country; some
connected with the press, some, I am sorry to say, belonging to the
learned professions. They agitate; their livelihood consists in
agitating; their freehold, their copyhold, their capital, their all in
all, depend on the excitement of the public mind. The events now briefly
alluded to were going on at the commencement of the year 1850. There
were two great questions before the public. There was the question of
the Texan boundary, and of a government for Utah and New Mexico, which I
consider as one question; and there was the question of making a
provision for the restoration of fugitive slaves. On these subjects, I
have something to say. Texas, as you know, established her independence
of Mexico by her revolution and the battle of San Jacinto, which made
her a sovereign power. I have already stated to you what I then
anticipated from the movement, namely, that she would ask to come into
the Union as a slave State. We admitted her in 1845, and we admitted her
as a slave State. We admitted her also with an undefined boundary;
remember that. She claimed by conquest the whole of that territory
commonly called New Mexico, east of the Rio Grande. She claimed also
those limits which her constitution had declared and marked out as the
proper limits of Texas. This was her claim, and when she was admitted
into the United States, the United States did not define her territory.
They admitted her as she was. We took her as she defined her own limits,
and with the power of making four additional slave States. I say "we,"
but I do not mean that I was one; I mean the United States admitted her.

What, then, was the state of things in 1850? There was Texas claiming
all, or a great part, of that which the United States had acquire