The Whig party, with this election, disappeared; its great leaders were dead, and it could not vie with the Democratic party in pro- slavery principles. There was no longer room for two such parties. The American people were already divided and dividing on the living issue of freedom or slavery. Slavery, like all wrong, was ever aggressive, and demanded new constitutional expositions in its interest by Congress and the courts, and it tolerated no more temporizing or compromises. Its advocates tried for a time to unite in the Democratic party. (66) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., pp. 733-6. (67) Jackson died June 8, 1845, past seventy-eight years of age. (68) _Thirty Years' View_, ii., p. 782. (69) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 747. (70) His remains were entombed in St. Philip's churchyard, Charleston, S. C. In 1865, on that city's occupancy by the Union forces, friends seized and secreted them from fancied desecration by the conquerors.--Draper's _Civil War in Am._, vol. i., p. 565. (71) Born April 12, 1777, died June 29, 1852. (72) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 764. (73) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 759. (74) _Ibid_., p. 765. (75) _Hist. of the U. S._ (Rhodes), vol. i., pp. 134 (190). (76) _Hist. Pac. States_, H. H. Bancroft, vol. xviii., p. 262. (77) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 770. (78) Cass died March 17, 1866, eighty-two years of age. XVII NEBRASKA ACT--1854 Over the disposition of the Territory of Nebraska it remained to have the last Congressional struggle for the extension of slavery. This Territory in 1854 comprised what are now the States of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. It was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, in area 485,000 square miles, twelve times as large as Ohio, about ten times the size of New York, 140,000 square miles larger than the original thirteen States,(79) and more than four times the area of Great Britain and Ireland. It was what was left of the purchase after Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Indian Territory were carved out. It then had only about one thousand white inhabitants. The desire to still placate the threatening South and to win its political favor, led some great and patriotic men of the North to attempt measures in the interest of slavery. On January 4, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, made a report embodying constitutional theories not hitherto promulgated, and questioning or repudiating others long supposed to have been settled. The report announced the discovery of a new principle of the Compromise measures of 1850. It declared: