The vigilant Southerners were of course alarmed. A nation of freemen adjoining them on the Southwest! A door thrown wide open for the easy escape of fugitives from their tyrannous grasp!! Something must be done to avert the threatened evil. Mr. Benton, of Missouri, in 1829, broached the scheme of the annexation of Texas, and the re-establishment of slavery there. He urged this as obviously necessary: first, in order to prevent the easy and continual escape of their slaves into an adjoining free country, the government of which had persistently refused to return the fugitives; second, to open a new field for slave labor, which was rapidly exhausting the soil of the old States, and a new market for the slaves of those States which, no longer capable of producing large crops, might still be sustained in population and political power by becoming the nurseries of slaves for the immense territory, to be obtained from Mexico by purchase or force; third, by adding to the number of slave States, to provide new securities for the continued ascendency of the slaveholders’ influence in the government of the nation. This last reason was probably the most momentous in the estimation of Southern statesmen. For the Texas, which they aimed to annex to our country, they foresaw might from time to time be divided and subdivided into seven States as large as New York, or into forty-three States as large as Massachusetts. Thus might the majority of the United States Senate be kept always ready to support any measure favorable to the interests of the slaveholding aristocracy, which had assumed the government of our Republic. Mr. Calhoun openly declared that “the measure of annexation is calculated and designed to uphold the institution of slavery, extend its influence, and secure its permanent duration.” The devoted, indefatigable, self-sacrificing, Benjamin Lundy, was living in Missouri at the time when Mr. Benton first proposed the Texas scheme, and at once gave him battle, so far as he was permitted to do it, in the newspapers of that State. Afterwards on removing to Maryland and establishing there his own paper, _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, he did all in his power to alarm the country. He went to Texas and, at great personal hazard, traversed that country and gathered a large amount of most important information, revealing the spirit of the settlers there and the designs of the projectors and managers of the scheme.