Congress adjourned without any provisions whatever for the organization or government of our recently acquired Territories. It is worth while to notice in passing that on the first introduction of the Wilmot proviso, in August, 1846, General Cass was decidedly in its favor, and regretted that it had been talked to death by the long speech of John Davis; but on the 24th of December, 1847, he wrote his famous "Nicholson letter," proclaiming his gospel of "popular sovereignty" in the Territories, which proved the seed- plot of immeasurable national trouble and disaster. "I am strongly impressed with the opinion," said he, "that a great change is going on in the public mind on this subject--in my own mind as well as others"; and he had before declared, on the 19th of February, that the passage of the Wilmot proviso "would be death to the war, death to all hope of getting an acre of territory, death to the administration, and death to the Democratic party." This was thoroughly characteristic, and in perfect harmony with his action, already referred to, respecting the Quintuple treaty; but it showed how the political waters were being troubled by the slavery question, and how impossible it was to accommodate the growing anti-slavery feeling of the country by any shallow expedients. But another conspiracy against freedom was now hatched; and if the Senate had strangled the Wilmot proviso, it was gratifying to find the House ready to strangle this monster of senatorial birth. I allude to the now almost forgotten "Clayton Compromise," which passed the Senate by a decided majority on the 26th of July. By submitting the whole question of slavery in all our Territories to the Supreme Court of the United States, as then constituted, it would almost certainly have spawned the curse in all of them, including Oregon, which had long been exposed to peril and massacre by the reckless opposition of our slave-masters to a government there without the recognition of slavery. The defeat of this nefarious proposition, which was happily followed by the passage of a bill giving Oregon a territorial government, is largely due to Alexander H. Stephens, whose motion to lay it on the table in the House prevailed by a small majority. In this action he had the courage to separate himself from the great body of the leading men of his own section; but in doing so he was prompted by his supreme devotion to slavery. This he has since denied and labored to explain in his private correspondence and published works, but the record is fatally against him. He was unwilling to trust the interests of the South in the hands of the Supreme Court, and his speech of August 7th, in the House of Representatives, in defense of his motion, gave very plausible reasons for his apprehensions; but the Dred Scott decision of a few years later showed how completely he misjudged that tribunal, and how opportunely his blindness came to the rescue of freedom.