legislative bodies, and in whatever other mode may seem expedient, against this enormous crime.”  In the postscript Douglas received personal mention.  “Not a man in Congress or out of Congress, in 1850, pretended that the compromise measures would repeal the Missouri prohibition.  Mr. Douglas himself never advanced such a pretence until this session.  His own Nebraska bill, of last session, rejected it.  It is a sheer afterthought.  To declare the prohibition inoperative, may, indeed, have effect in law as a repeal, but it is a most discreditable way of reaching the object.  Will the people permit their dearest interests to be thus made the mere hazards of a presidential game, and destroyed by false facts and false inferences?"[466]

This attack roused the tiger in the Senator from Illinois.  When he addressed the Senate on January 30th, he labored under ill-repressed anger.  Even in the expurgated columns of the Congressional Globe enough stinging personalities appeared to make his friends regretful.  What excited his wrath particularly was that Chase and Sumner had asked for a postponement of discussion, in order to examine the bill, and then, in the interval, had sent out their indictment of the author.  It was certainly unworthy of him to taunt them with having desecrated the Sabbath day by writing their plea.  The charge was not only puerile but amusing, when one considers how Douglas himself was observing that particular Sabbath.

It was comparatively easy to question and disprove the unqualified statement of the Appeal, that “the original settled policy of the United States was non-extension of slavery.”  Less convincing was Douglas’s attempt to prove that the Missouri Compromise was expressly annulled in 1850, when portions of Texas and of the former Spanish province of Louisiana were added to New Mexico, and also a part of the province of Louisiana was joined to Utah.  Douglas was in the main correct as to geographical data; but he could not, and did not, prove that the members of the Thirty-first Congress purposed also to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction in all the other unorganized Territories.  This contention was one of those non-sequiturs of which Douglas, in the heat of argument, was too often guilty.  Still more regrettable, because it seemed to convict him of sophistry, was the mode by which he sought to evade the charge of the Appeal, that the act organizing New Mexico and settling the boundary of Texas had reaffirmed the Missouri Compromise.  To establish his point he had to assume that all the land cut off from Texas north of 36 deg. 30’, was added to New Mexico, thus leaving nothing to which the slavery restriction, reaffirmed in the act of 1850, could apply.  But Chase afterward invalidated this assumption and Douglas was forced so to qualify his original statement as to yield the point.  This was a damaging admission and prejudiced his cause before the country.  But when he brought his wide knowledge of American colonization to bear upon the concrete problems of governmental policy, his grasp of the situation was masterly.