could deal with every question that arose concerning it as
a question of expediency merely, or of law and precedent.

To which of these groups should Douglas join himself? Up to this time,
his public record was too meagre to show clearly where he stood. In
1845, when the bill to annex Texas was before the House, he had offered
an amendment extending the compromise line of 1820 through the new
State, so that if Texas were ever divided slavery would be prohibited in
such State or States as should be formed north of that line. Both in
the House and in the Senate he had voted against the famous resolution
of Mr. David Wilmot to exclude slavery from any territory that we might
get from Mexico, and he continued to oppose that motion, in whatever
form it appeared, until the legislature of Illinois instructed him to
favor it. In 1848, he voted for the so-called Clayton Compromise, which
proposed to organize California, Oregon, and New Mexico into Territories
and merely extend over them the Constitution and laws of the United
States so far as these should prove applicable; but he also voted for
the bill to organize the Territory of Oregon with a clause prohibiting
slavery. By his speeches, no less than by his votes, he was committed to
the position that the Missouri Compromise was a final settlement so far
as the Louisiana Purchase was concerned, and that the compromise line
ought to be extended through the Mexican Cession to the Pacific. He was
not clearly committed on any other of the points at issue between the
friends and the opponents of slavery.

But he had roundly denounced the abolitionists, and he had married the
daughter of a slaveholder. The day after his wedding his father-in-law
presented him a deed to a plantation in Mississippi and a number of
slaves. He gave it back, not, so he declared, because he thought it
wrong to hold slaves, but because he did not know how to govern them or
to manage a plantation. His wife soon fell heir to the land and negroes,
and at her death they passed to her children under a will which
requested that the blacks be not sold but kept and cared for by the
testator's descendants. Douglas, as the guardian of his infant children,
respected their grandfather's wishes. For that reason he was called a
slaveholder, and a fellow senator once openly accused him of shaping his
course as a public man to accord with his private interests. He denied
and disproved the charge, but proudly added: "I im