The slavery question had now come to be the foremost question among the people. By the Missouri Compromise of 1821, slavery was not to extend north beyond latitude 36° 30´. When, in 1849, California asked admittance to the Union as a free State, the South, feeling that the balance of power would be on the side of freedom, bitterly opposed it. Henry Clay, the great compromiser, brought forward his "Omnibus Bill" in 1850, the principal features of which were that California should be a free State, and the Fugitive Slave Law should be more stringent, so that Southerners might reclaim slaves in the Northern States, and take them back to bondage, and it should be the duty of Northerners to help them. President Millard Fillmore signed these measures. Mr. Beecher wrote for the New York _Independent_ a three-column article, entitled, "Shall We Compromise?" The dying John C. Calhoun had it read twice to him. "The man who says that is right," he repeated. "There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery." When Daniel Webster, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, favored compromise, "Then it was that I flamed," said Mr. Beecher, and from that time till the Civil War was over he was at a white heat. When Wendell Phillips was denied a place to speak because he was an Abolitionist, and no one dared to rent a hall for him through fear of a mob, Henry Ward Beecher opened Plymouth pulpit. He went to every trustee for his consent. It the man hesitated, Mr. Beecher said, "You and I will break if you don't give me this permission," and he signed. A great audience assembled, and men were ready with revolvers to use them if the mob molested the speaker. Mr. Beecher would not ride in omnibuses where colored persons were refused. He invited Frederick Douglass to sit beside him on the platform in Plymouth Church--he would not have a pulpit, which half hid the pastor from his people. Mr. Beecher's sister, Mrs. Stowe, had published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a serial in 1851, and in book form in 1852, which electrified the North and infuriated the South. When Stephen A. Douglas proposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was carried in 1854, Kansas became a battle-ground between slaveholders and lovers of freedom. Houses were burned, men were murdered, and all the horrors of civil war continued for four years. Mr. Beecher's voice and pen were never silent: "Peace in Kansas," he said, "means peace everywhere; war there will be war all over the land.... What is done must be done quickly. Funds must be freely given, arms must be had, even if bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: 'He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.'" He took up collections in Plymouth Church and elsewhere for Sharp's rifles, and for Bibles as well. Some of the rifles were sent, it is said, in boxes marked Bibles, though without his knowledge, and were therefore called "Beecher's Bibles."