Arkansas had been admitted as a slave state in the year 1836 and Michigan as a free state in 1837; and in 1845 Florida was admitted as a slave state, the same act providing for the admission of Iowa, which was a free state, but did not come in until 1846. On the 29th of December, the independent Republic of Texas was admitted into the Union as a state, and came in with slavery already established there. This admission, or annexation as it was called, of Texas, resulted in the war with Mexico and the establishment, at the close of the war in 1848, of the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas and the acquisition of the provinces or territories of New Mexico and upper California as United States territory. The admission of Texas gave a new impulse to the antislavery agitation, and the acquisition, by the war, of the new territory brought it again prominently before Congress. Even before the close of the war with Mexico, the old proposition for the exclusion of slavery from the public territories was revived, with a view to its application to any territory that might be acquired as a result of the war, and it was then designated as the "Wilmot Proviso" from the name of the member re-introducing it. On all propositions to establish governments of the newly acquired territory, after the close of the war, the "Wilmot Proviso" was pressed with great vehemence by Northern politicians, and was strenuously resisted by those of the South. The most extreme of the Southern politicians were willing to extend the so-called Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30´ to the Pacific ocean, and regard it as a final settlement of the question, but the Northern advocates of the proviso would listen to no terms for an adjustment, and thus again repudiated the principle and spirit of the settlement made by the Missouri bill. Southern statesmen, while willing to accept the line of 36° 30´ for the sake of peace, did not claim the right to foster slavery even upon the territory south of that line, by the action of Congress, but they claimed that the question should be left where the Constitution of the United States left it, that is, that the people settling in the territories should be allowed freedom to adopt their own institutions when they came to form state governments, and that Congress in the meantime should adopt no measures to forestall their action. They urged that the territory was acquired by the common blood and treasure, and that Congress, therefore, in its action, should not give preference to one section over another and thus virtually exclude the people of the South from the newly acquired domain. This was a reasonable and just view of the subject, and did not look to the increase of the number of slaves, but merely to their expansion over a wider area, and the older states from the rapidly increasing slave population. Nor was the proposition to exclude slavery ever in the interest of freedom, for it sought merely to