The principal subject of this discussion was whether the Senate would recede from the above-mentioned amendment moved by Mr. Douglass, which was finally decided in the affirmative.  In these discussions, a considerable portion of which was of a conversational character, Mr. Webster took a leading part; but of most of what was said by him, as by other Senators, no report has been preserved.  The session of the Senate at which the last and most animated discussion of this subject took place, nominally on Saturday of the 12th of August, was prolonged till ten o’clock, A.M., of Sunday, the 13th.  In the course of the debate on this day Mr. Webster spoke as follows.]

I am very little inclined to prolong this debate, and I hope I am utterly disinclined to bring into it any new warmth or excitement.  I wish to say a few words, however, first, upon the question as it is presented to us, as a parliamentary question; and secondly, upon the general political questions involved in the debate.

As a question of parliamentary proceeding, I understand the case to be this.  The House of Representatives sent us a bill for the establishment of a territorial government in Oregon; and no motion has been made in the Senate to strike out any part of that bill.  The bill purporting to respect Oregon, simply and alone, has not been the subject of any objection in this branch of the legislature.  The Senate has proposed no important amendment to this bill, affecting Oregon itself; and the honorable member from Missouri[1] was right, entirely right, when he said that the amendment now under consideration had no relation to Oregon.  That is perfectly true; and therefore the amendment which the Senate has adopted, and the House has disagreed to, has no connection with the immediate subject before it.  The truth is, that it is an amendment by which the Senate wished to have now a public, legal declaration, not respecting Oregon, but respecting the newly acquired territories of California and New Mexico.  It wishes now to make a line of slavery, which shall include those new territories.  The amendment says that the line of the “Missouri Compromise” shall be the line to the Pacific, and then goes on to say, in the language of the bill as it now stands, that the Ordinance of 1787 shall be applicable to Oregon; and therefore I say that the amendment proposed is foreign to the immediate object of the bill.  It does nothing to modify, restrain, or affect, in any way, the government which we propose to establish over Oregon, or the condition or character of that government, or of the people under it.  In a parliamentary view, this is the state of the case.