In his reply to Calhoun, Douglas emancipated himself successfully from his gross partisanship.  Planting himself firmly upon the national theory of the Federal Union, he hewed away at what he termed Calhoun’s fundamental error—­“the error of supposing that his particular section has a right to have a ‘due share of the territories’ set apart and assigned to it.”  Calhoun had said much about Southern rights and Northern aggressions, citing the Ordinance of 1787 as an instance of the unfair exclusion of the South from the public domain.  Douglas found a complete refutation of this error in the early history of Illinois, where slavery had for a long time existed in spite of the Ordinance.  His inference from these facts was bold and suggestive, if not altogether convincing.

“These facts furnish a practical illustration of that great truth, which ought to be familiar to all statesmen and politicians, that a law passed by the national legislature to operate locally upon a people not represented, will always remain practically a dead letter upon the statute book, if it be in opposition to the wishes and supposed interests of those who are to be affected by it, and at the same time charged with its execution.  The Ordinance of 1787 was practically a dead letter.  It did not make the country, to which it applied, practically free from slavery.  The States formed out of the territory northwest of the Ohio did not become free by virtue of the ordinance, nor in consequence of it ... [but] by virtue of their own will."[347]

Douglas was equally convinced that the Missouri Compromise had had no practical effect upon slavery.  So far from depriving the South of its share of the West, that Compromise had simply “allayed an unfortunate excitement which was alienating the affections of different portions of the Union.”  “Slavery was as effectually excluded from the whole of that country, by the laws of nature, of climate, and production, before, as it is now, by act of Congress."[348] As for the exclusion of the South from the Oregon Territory, the law of 1848 “did nothing more than re-enact and affirm the law which the people themselves had previously adopted, and rigorously executed, for the period of twelve years.”  The exclusion of slavery was the deliberate act of the people of Oregon:  “it was done in obedience to that great Democratic principle, that it is wiser and better to leave each community to determine and regulate its own local and domestic affairs in its own way."[349]

An amendment to the Constitution to establish a permanent equilibrium between slave and free States, Douglas rightly characterized as “a moral and physical impossibility.”  The cause of freedom had steadily advanced, while slavery had receded.  “We all look forward with confidence to the time when Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and probably North Carolina and Tennessee, will adopt a gradual system of emancipation.  In the meantime,” said he, with the exultant