When, in 1857, Mr. Davis was again elected to the Senate, the Compromise of 1850 had already become a dead letter, as he had predicted that it would. The anti-slavery sentiment had, like Aaron's rod, swallowed all rivals, and party leaders once noted for conservatism, had resolved to suppress the curse, despite the decision of the Supreme Court statute, of law, of even the Constitution itself. Those who have criticised Mr. Davis most bitterly for his attitude at that time have failed to appreciate the fact that he then occupied the exact ground where he had always stood. Others had changed. He had remained consistent. He had never countenanced the doctrine of nullification; he had always affirmed the right of secession. Profoundly versed, as he was, in the constitutional law of the United States, familiar with every phase of the question debated by the Convention of 1787, his logical mind was unable to reach a conclusion adverse to the right of a sovereign state to withdraw from a voluntary compact, the violation of which endangered its interests. He believed that the compact was violated by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; he felt that it was being violated now, but as in 1850 he had declared that nothing short of the necessity of self-protection would justify the dissolution of the Union, he now pleaded with the majority not to force that necessity upon the South. Secession he frankly declared to be a great evil, so great that the South would only adopt it as the last resort; but at the same time he warned the abolitionists that if the guarantees of the Constitution were not respected, that if the Northern states were to defy the decrees of the Supreme Court favorable to the South, as they had done in the Dred Scott decision, that if his section was to be ruled by a hostile majority without regard to the right, the protection thrown around the minority by the fundamental law of the land, that the Southern states could not in honor remain members of the Union, and would therefore certainly withdraw from it.