generation thought of it merely as the slavery
question.

The presidential election of 1848 made a good occasion for men to take
account of the question, and of their own minds concerning it. In
February, 1848, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded to the
United States the territory out of which California, New Mexico, and
Utah have been formed. With the signing of the treaty the material
elements of the problem, as it presented itself to that generation, were
completely arranged.

In fifteen Southern States and in the District of Columbia slavery was
sanctioned and protected by law. In fifteen Northern States slavery was
prohibited by law. The foreign slave trade was long since prohibited
altogether, though from time to time, in a small way, it was
surreptitiously revived. The domestic slave trade, among the slave
States and in the District, was still permitted. There was a law on the
statute book to compel the return of slaves fleeing into the free
States, but certain of its provisions had been pronounced
unconstitutional, and it was ineffective. Of the territory acquired from
France in 1803, all that part which lay south of the line of 36 deg. 30',
North latitude, with Missouri, which lay north of the line, was either
organized into slave States or set apart for the Indians; in all that
part which lay north of the line of 36 deg. 30', except Missouri, slavery
was forbidden by a law of Congress passed in 1820. It was competent for
Congress to repeal the law at any time, but from the country's long
acquiescence in it, and from the circumstances of its passage, which
were such that a stigma of bad faith would be fixed upon whichever
section should move for its repeal, it seemed to have a force and
stability more like the Constitution's itself than that of ordinary
laws. There remained the territory got from Mexico, concerning which,
although from the beginning of the war the question of slavery in any
territory that might come to us at the end of it had been constantly in
agitation, Congress had as yet passed no law. What law Congress should
make about slavery in California, New Mexico, and Utah was the main
question. But there was also a question of the right boundary between
New Mexico and Texas, which had been admitted in 1845 as a slave State,
with an agreement that she might at any time divide herself up into four
States.

The material elements of the problem, then, were comparatively simple,
and the