Slavery Question in Oregon. 203 of "States* riglitvs" and "strict construetiou '* as a barrier to autieipated eneroaohmeuts of the general goverumeut that they opposed any legislation by it to prevent the spreading of slavery. Jefferson, in his own opinion, was outside of the Constitution when he purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1S03, yet seventeen years afterward when slavery had emerged from its let-alone self-condemnatory status and become the chief, if not the only, menace to the peace and prosperitj^ of the American people and truly democratic government, both lie and IMadison were opposed to the ^lissouri restriction then pending in Congress. AYe can hardly suppose that these two great men were insincere in the part they had taken in the formation of the American Republic— one noted as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and the ordinance pro- hibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory by act of Congress, and the other as one of the chief makers of the Constitution, but it is difficult to account for their action in the Missouri struggle without supposing that they, too, were carried away by their Southern sympathy or constrained by the fear of disunion. In any aspect of the case it was a most pernicious example for the great apostle of genuine democracy to set for his party, which thenceforth became the preferred instrument of those whose interests were inimical to any form of dem- ocracy. It is unnecessary to more than mention the successive steps of debasement, the annexation of Texas and war with Mexico, the resistance to the admission of California as a free State, the repeal of the ^Missouri Compromise, the support of the border ruffian government in Kansas— and all made possi- ble by three principal causes : the threat of disunion, the cor- rupting influence of the spoils system of politics, and the se- ductions which great power offers to those ambitious for offi- cial preferment— the last two the most potent and liable to be turned against them at any election. We should do scant jus- tice to the intellectual ability of our Southern fellow citizens, in supposing them ignorant of the spontaneous forces of ad- vancing civilization working to undermine the system of chattel slavery, and that its security lay not in the let-alone
