Its discussion in Congress was attended with heats such as had not been witnessed for many years. It laid the foundation for the political success of the party then beginning to be known as the Republican, and it produced the hopeless disruption of the Democratic party when its nomination for the Presidency next after Mr. Buchanan’s was to be made. Proud, disdainful of the predictions made by others of the danger to the Union arising from his measure, confident in his own energies and his ability to unite the Democratic party in the South and in the North upon his principle of “non-intervention,” Mr. Douglas gained a momentary triumph at the expense of his own political future, of the future of his party, and of the peace of the Union. For a time, however, it seemed as if he had secured a following that would insure the acceptance of his principle. All the Southern Senators, Whigs and Democrats, with two exceptions,[29] and all the Northern Democratic Senators, with three exceptions,[30] voted for his bill. The Whig Senators from the North, and those who more distinctively represented the Northern anti-slavery, or “Free-soil” sentiment, voted against it; but the latter hailed it as a means that would consolidate the North into a great political organization, with freedom inscribed upon its banners. Mr. Buchanan, it will be remembered, was at this time in England. Footnote 29: Mr. Bell, of Tennessee, and Mr. Clayton, of Delaware. Footnote 30: Messrs. Allen and James, of Rhode Island, and Mr. Walker, of Wisconsin. He has said that although down to this period the anti-slavery party of the North had been the assailing party and kept the people of the South in constant irritation, yet, “in sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise the Senators and Representatives of the Southern States became the aggressors themselves.”[31] And it was one of the worst features of this aggression that it was made under the lead of a Northern Democrat; for if the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a boon offered to the South, they could say that it was a boon offered from the North.[32] Footnote 31: Buchanan’s Defence, p. 28. Footnote 32: It must be remembered that this took place long before the case of “Dred Scott” had been acted upon in the Supreme Court of the United States. The fatal effects of this measure were two-fold; first in unsettling what had been settled in 1850, and secondly in precipitating a struggle in Kansas as between the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery parties, which, although it was local, spread itself in opposite sympathies throughout the North and the South. The Compromise Measures of 1850 had settled every possible question in relation to slavery on which Congress could then or ever afterwards act.