On the motives that dictated the assertion of this doctrine, I have no speculations to offer, for I am not dealing with motives. That it was a new political doctrine, and that it was a new departure in the legislation of Congress on this subject of slavery in Territories cannot be doubted. It rejected entirely the principle on which Congress had acted for many years, for there had been acts of Congress which had given legal existence to slavery in a Territory, and acts of Congress which had prohibited it. It rejected the principle of the Missouri Compromise, which had sanctioned an agreed division of the Territories into those where slavery might not and those where it might be allowed. It rejected all claim of right on the part of the Southern slaveholder to take his slave property into a Territory and have it there recognized as property while the Territorial condition remained. It was a reading of the Constitution diametrically opposed to the Southern reading. The political men who framed this “platform” doubtless considered that the time had come for a direct antagonism between the North and the South on this subject, so that it might be decided by the votes of the people in a Presidential election, whether the Southern claim for recognition of slave property in any Territory of the United States, wherever situated, was to prevail or be rejected. That such antagonism was the consequence and the purpose of this declaration of a new principle of action on this subject will be denied by no one.