Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-65: its Causes, Incidents, and Results: Intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the War for the Union. Volume I.

[231] were not always the case in compromises — each party conceding something he would gladly retain, in order to secure something else that is otherwise beyond his reach.) But that Mr. Clay deliberately bargained to secure what he greatly desired (the admission of Missouri), knowing that the stipulated consideration was utterly beyond the power of Congress, therefore a blank nullity--that, Mr. Dixon did not assert, nor would any true friend of the great Kentuckian's memory insinuate it. Whatever Mr. Dixon's belief on the subject, it is certain that Mr. Clay deemed the Missouri Compromise a valid contract, and that he never dreamed that it was either unauthorized by the Constitution or superseded by the Compromise of 1850. No champion, no adversary, of this latter arrangement ever suggested, whether as an argument for, or an objection to, this scheme, that one of its effects or incidents would be the repeal of the Missouri Restriction, and a consequent opening to Slavery of the region stretching westward and north-westward from Missouri.

Mr. Douglas, it will be seen, indorses none of Mr. Dixon's assumptions. He had misunderstood Mr. Dixon's original proposition, supposing that it intended to “legislate Slavery into the Territory.” He could mean by this nothing more nor other than that he misunderstood Mr. Dixon's as a proposition to legislate Slave law--that is, law under which slaves could be legally held to service — into said Territory; the act of planting Slavery in fact there, being one which legislation might facilitate and invite, but which individual action must initiate and achieve. And he did not now contend that the legislation of 1850 had even removed the obstacle to such establishment, but only that the action he proposed was “in accordance with the principles of the Compromise measures of 1850” --that is to say, it applied to Kansas and Nebraska--Territories secured, upon due consideration, to Free Labor, by sacred agreement in 1820--a principle which Congress had, under very different circumstances, applied to New Mexico--a most unlike and peculiar region — in 1850.

Mr. Dixon, it will be remarked, had not yet attained to the ultimate orthodoxy of the South with respect to the rights of slaveholders in the Territories. He only held that Congress had no right to exclude them with their human chattels.¹ That it was bound to recognize and protect their property in slaves, and that the people of the Territories could have no right, prior to their organization as a State, to exclude or inhibit Slavery, were dogmas as yet confined to the more ardent devotees of Calhounism, and so far from being accepted, that they were scarcely comprehended by the great body of the supporters of the Compromise.

The amended bill, thus reported by Mr. Douglas, was debated at