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[379] 114 to 82--not one Whig, and but four Democrats, from the Free States, sustaining it.1 It was defeated again in the next Congress, when proposed by Mr. Douglas, in 1848: Yeas 82; Nays 121; only three Democrats and no Whig from Free States sustaining it.2 The Republican party was now required, in the year 1861, to assent to a partition of the territories, and an establishment of Slavery therein, which both the Whig and the Democratic parties of the Free States had repeatedly, and all but unanimously, rejected before there was any Republican party. Thus the North, under the lead of the Republicans, was required to make, on pain of civil war, concessions to Slavery which it had utterly refused when divided only between the “conservative” parties of fifteen or twenty years ago.

III. The vital principle of this, as of all compromises or projects of conciliation proposed from the South to the North, was this: “ You shall regard Slavery as we do, and agree with us that it is beneficent and right. We will concede that it is not desirable nor profitable in your harsh climate, on your rugged soil; and you must concur with us in affirming that it is the very thing for our fervid suns and fertile vales. Then we will go forward, conquering, annexing, settling, planting, and filling the markets of the world with our great staples, while you shall be amply enriched by our commerce and by our constantly expanding markets for your food and manufactures.” In other words, Slavery was henceforth to be regarded, on all hands, as the basis at once of our National industry and our National policy.

IV. As a part of this compact, the North was to silence her lecturers, muzzle her press, chloroform her pulpits, and bully her people into a silence respecting Slavery, which should be broken only by the utterance of vindications and panegyrics. Already the great publishing houses of our Northern cities had been very generally induced to mutilate the works they from time to time issued, by expunging from them every passage or sentiment obnoxious to the fastidious, exacting taste of the slaveholders. Some of our authors--Mr. James K. Paulding conspicuous among them — had revised their own works, and issued new editions, wherein their old-time utterances adverse to Slavery had been supplanted by fulsome adulations of the system or vehement abuse of its opponents. Our Missionary, Tract, and other religious organizations, had very generally been induced to expurgate their publications and their efforts of all anti-Slavery ideas. Our great popular churches had either bent to the storm or been broken by it. And now, the work was to be completed by a new and comprehensive “adjustment,” taking the place and, in part, the name of that “Compromise” which the Slave Power had first forced upon the North and then coolly repudiated; an adjustment which was to bind the Free States over to perpetual complicity in slaveholding, and perpetual stifling of all exposure of, or remonstrance against, the existence, the domination, and the diffusion of Slavery.

These strictures are neither impelled nor colored by any unkindly feeling toward Mr. Crittenden, whose

1 See pages 196-7.

2 See pages 197-8.

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