This was the blackest chapter in the history of the agitation for Freedom on this continent. The era seemed to have been at last reached of national surrender to slavery's demands, and of the purchase of peace by the abandonment of (with the promise never to resume) resistance to "the sum of all villainies." John Quincy Adams had said that up to his day "the preservation, propagation, and perpetuation of slavery" had ever been "the animating spirit" of the American government. Daniel Webster had bitterly declared in 1848 that there was no North in American politics, and that the South absolutely controlled the government. Certainly, in 1853, the surface of the political situation fully justified the indignant words of Gerrit Smith: "Were this government despotic and her religion heathen, there might be some hope of republicanizing her politics and Christianizing her religion; but now that she has turned into darkness the greatest of all political lights and the greatest of all religious lights, what hope is left for her?" It was at this juncture, when its triumph appeared to be complete, that slavery fatally overreached itself. The Missouri compromise of 1820, which _forever_ prohibited slavery in all of the original Louisiana territory north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes of north latitude, had remained unquestioned upon the statute books for a generation. The South had received the full benefits of its share of that bargain, which added Arkansas and Missouri to the ranks of the slave States. In the interminable discussions of 1850 there had been no suggestion that the compromise measures of that year were intended to either disturb or supersede the Missouri compact, and the first message of Franklin Pierce congratulated the country on the sense of repose and security in the public mind which the compromise measures had restored, and added the pledge, "this repose is to suffer no shock during my official term, if I have power to avert it." Before two months had elapsed, the North heard with astonishment and indignation the doctrine laid down in Congress by the representatives of the slave power that the Missouri compromise had been abrogated by the measures of 1850, and that the vast domain between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, rich in all material and political possibilities, was open to slaveholding settlement. A few days more passed, and it was discovered that this claim was receiving the powerful support of the administration, and that it would also be championed by Stephen A. Douglas, with his formidable energy, personal influence, and rare skill in debate, as a step towards the vindication of his dogma of "Popular Sovereignty." Of the memorable four months' struggle over this issue, the following is a sketch in outline: