The very month that Plymouth Church took possession of its new house, the first month of the last half of the nineteenth century, Henry Clay submitted a series of resolutions in the Senate of the United States as “compromise measures for a final and complete adjustment of the slavery question.” In the debate, passage, and enforcement of these measures, the utterly antagonistic nature of the two contending elements, liberty and slavery, which had been brought together under our Constitution, became so evident; slavery, from the very necessity of self-preservation, became so aggressive, advanced claims so comprehensive and so forced the fighting, that the very measures intended to compromise the whole difficulty made it clear that there could be _no_ compromise. There could be no amicable adjustment of interests so diametrically opposed; one or the other, liberty or slavery, must take undivided and undisputed possession of the government. From debate of words the conflict passed rapidly to the argument of arms, first on the plains of Kansas and eventually over the whole southern half of our country, developing into the greatest civil war ever known in the world’s history—a war in comparison with which, in the numbers engaged on either side, in the breadth of the battle-field, in the agents of destruction employed and the important interests at stake, England’s Wars of the Roses, and even the strife of the rival claimants for the imperial purple of Rome, were insignificant and secondary contests. The part of this great slavery conflict in which Mr. Beecher was actively engaged had five distinct eras, clearly marked by well-defined boundaries, each presenting peculiar difficulties of its own to be overcome, and each bringing forward peculiar and important questions for solution. The first began with the agitation of the Compromise measures of 1850, and ended in the passage of those measures and their enforcement, more or less complete, during the uneasy years of 1850 and 1853. The second began with the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise measures and continued through what was known as “The Kansas Struggle,” until April 1, 1858, when the first substantial victory ever won by the free States was gained in Congress in the permission to give the actual residents of Kansas a fair vote upon the question of the acceptance or rejection of the infamous Lecompton Constitution. The third began with the abandonment by the slave-power of its dependence upon legislative enactments, which its defeat in Kansas had proved to be futile, and the inauguration of an era of secession and violence, and ended with the Proclamation of Emancipation, which took effect January 1, 1863, and which legally destroyed slavery in all the States in rebellion, and substantially within the whole domain of the United States.