“Henry, the battle is coming on. When it will end I know not. I only hope that every one feels as alert as I do” (extract from a letter of Mrs. Stowe to Henry Ward Beecher). It was dated November 1, 1852, but expresses the feeling of some of the more sagacious ones during the whole of this era of apparent peace. They were not deceived by the surface calm. They felt that, beneath all party platforms, and the compromises of party politics, and the make-shifts of a commercial spirit, the great conscience of the North was being stirred. Deep was calling unto deep, and the moanings of the sea that presaged the coming tempest had reached their ears. The storm, not a new one but the violent rising of the same old elements, began in Congress in the early part of 1854, upon the question of the organization of the territory of “The Platte,” afterwards divided into two Territories called “Kansas and Nebraska.” The star of empire was moving Westward, but of what kind should this empire be, of liberty or slavery? If matters continued as they then were it must be the former. California, stretching along the Pacific coast for two hundred and fifty miles below Mason and Dixon’s line, had declared for freedom through all her borders. The Territories of New Mexico and Utah were not favorable to any great growth of slavery nor capable of rendering it much assistance. Texas, although intensely pro-slavery, yet, by reason of State pride, would not divide her imperial domain into quarters for the benefit of that institution. Only in one direction was expansion and growth possible, and that was in this broad domain which was now asking to be organized into Territories and would soon demand admission as States. Why should not this magnificent country be opened to the slave-owner and his property as well as to the settler from the North? Was not this his right? Other factors than property interests have entered into the question. Conscience has been enlisted upon the one side as on the other. The South has come to look upon slavery as having equal rights, under the Constitution, with liberty, and she feels aggrieved that she is not given all the privileges of her fellow-citizens of the North. The only thing that apparently prevented this natural and, as it seemed to her, just expansion, was the Missouri Compromise, which had solemnly guaranteed this whole territory to freedom. Why not repeal this obnoxious measure? The proposition to do this sprang from Kentucky. The same State which, through its senator. Henry Clay, had been foremost in originally securing the act, now through its senator, Mr. Dixon, his successor, was the first to ask for its repeal. Unlike as the movement seems, and disowned as it undoubtedly would have been by Mr. Clay, the great projector of the Missouri Compromise, yet in reality the substance of each is the same. In both there is but one design—to placate the slave-power and save the country by attempting to compromise, not