of the Southern press was distinctly unfriendly to him and his Freeport doctrine.[776] He told his auditors at Memphis that he indorsed the decision of the Supreme Court; he believed that the owners of slaves had the same right to take them into the Territories as they had to take other property; but slaves once in the Territory were then subject to local laws for protection, on an equal footing with all other property.  If no local laws protecting slave property were passed, slavery would be practically excluded.  “Non-action is exclusion.”  It was a matter of soil, climate, interests, whether a Territory would permit slavery or not.  “You come right back to the principle of dollars and cents ...  If old Joshua E. Giddings should raise a colony in Ohio and settle down in Louisiana, he would be the strongest advocate of slavery in the whole South; he would find when he got there, his opinion would be very much modified; he would find on those sugar plantations that it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the negro and the crocodile.”  “The Almighty has drawn the line on this continent, on one side of which the soil must be cultivated by slave labor; on the other by white labor."[777]

At New Orleans, he repeated more emphatically much the same thought.  “There is a line, or belt of country, meandering through the valleys and over the mountain tops, which is a natural barrier between free territory and slave territory, on the south of which are to be found the productions suitable to slave labor, while on the north exists a country adapted to free labor alone....  But in the great central regions, where there may be some doubt as to the effect of natural causes, who ought to decide the question except the people residing there, who have all their interests there, who have gone there to live with their wives and children!"[778]

It was characteristic of the man that he thought politics even when he was in pursuit of health.  Advised to take an ocean voyage, he decided to visit Cuba so that even his recreative leisure might be politically profitable, for the island was more than ever coveted by the South and he wished to have the advantage of first-hand information about this unhappy Spanish province.  Landing in New York upon his return, he was given a remarkable ovation by the Democracy of the city; and he was greeted with equal warmth in Philadelphia and Baltimore.[779] Even a less ambitious man might have been tempted to believe in his own capacity for leadership, in the midst of these apparently spontaneous demonstrations of regard.  At the capital, however, he was less cordially welcomed.  He was not in the least surprised, for while he was still in the South, the newspapers had announced his deposition from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories.  He knew well enough what he had to expect from the group of Southern Democrats who had the ear of the administration.[780] Nevertheless, his removal from a position which he had held ever since he entered the Senate was a bitter pill.