Such aspersions upon Webster’s motives were as unfair as Whittier’s bitter lament and denunciation in the poem “Ichabod,” but the same righteous anger dictated both. As a hoax, the _Evening Post_ published in its issue of May 21 glaring headlines, proclaiming: “GREAT MEETING IN BOSTON!!--Tremendous Excitement--DANIEL WEBSTER--Out in Favor of--Applying the Proviso to All the Territories!!--No Compromise in Massachusetts!!!” The news story below was an account from _Niles’s Register_ of Dec. 11, 1819, when the Missouri Compromise was pending, of Webster’s speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Boston, in which he asserted that it was the constitutional duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all territory not included in the thirteen original States. It strikingly exhibited the orator’s inconsistency. The pro-slavery _Commercial_ was angry, declaring that many New Yorkers had not noted the date 1819 and had been deceived. Clay’s measures, following the death of President Taylor, were passed by Congress, but to the end the _Evening Post_ protested that no permanent compromise was possible. The issue was whether a slave-holding minority should have a share of the new territories equal to that of the anti-slavery majority. The answer was yes or no, for there could be no middle ground. “If an association is composed of twenty members and five insist upon having an equal voice in its affairs with the other fifteen, what compromise can there be? You must either grant what they ask or deny it.” It was not until the ambitious Douglas, in 1854, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and Pierce brought his Administration behind the measure, that the _Evening Post_ found it impossible to continue its connection with the Democratic Party. The horror with which Bryant and Bigelow looked upon this enactment is easily understood. They had expected the great valley of the Platte as a matter of course to be settled as free soil, since it lay north of the Missouri Compromise line, 36′ 30″. It had been taken for granted, when proposals had been made to erect territories there, that slavery had once for all been excluded. But now Douglas, maintaining that the people in such regions should exercise their own choice for or against slavery, proposed to nullify the Missouri Compromise, and to create two territories, in which there should be no restrictions as to slavery, and in which the people should be perfectly free to regulate their “domestic institutions” as they saw fit. It was a body-blow to the North.