joined the new party in the undefined but warmly cherished hope that it might somehow find means of ridding the Republic of the curse and the scandal of slavery. CHAPTER VII THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL AND SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY The Missouri Compromise was in effect repealed by the compromise measures of 1850 but there was as yet no formal repeal. The effect of the compromise measures of 1850 was presently to stir up a greater strife than ever on the subject of slavery and even to raise new questions with regard to it. The ultra Southern men began to see that the Compromise of 1850 had given them practically nothing whatever in the way of territory out of which to create future slave states. It had admitted California as a free state. It had opened Utah, which lay mostly to the north of the dead line, to the possible introduction of slavery if its future settlers should so decree upon coming into the Union, as no sane man in any quarter of the country imagined that they ever would. It had also separated New Mexico which lay mostly south of the dead line, from the slave state of Texas with a like license to its future settlers if there should ever be any such, to choose for themselves whether or not they would permit slavery in their domain. Neither of these territories promised, at that time, to become a state within the life of the generation then in being, and in point of fact neither did. Utah was not admitted to the Union until 1896, long after the utter abolition of slavery had been accomplished by constitutional amendment, and New Mexico, at the beginning of the twentieth century is still a territory of vast area and very small population. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law was in fact the only return the Compromise of 1850 had made to the South for what the South regarded as a practical surrender of territory that might otherwise have been molded into slave states. At the North this compensatory enactment was everywhere regarded as an excessive return for such concessions as had been made. The great body of the Northern people would not and could not lend themselves to the execution of a law which offended their consciences as no other law had ever done. They could not make themselves, as that law required them to do, participants in a system which they held to be utterly wrong and iniquitous. Thus the South felt itself wronged and cheated in the compromise and the North felt that its conscience had been outraged and its integrity of mind assailed.