EXTENSION OF THE MISSOURI BOUNDARY.
This was a measure of great moment to Missouri and full of difficulties in itself, and requiring a double process to accomplish it—an act of Congress to extend the boundary, and an Indian treaty to remove the Indians to a new home. It was to extend the existing boundary of the State so as to include a triangle between the existing line and the Missouri River, large enough to form seven counties of the first class, and fertile enough to sustain the densest population. The difficulties were threefold: 1. To make still larger a State which was already one of the largest in the Union. 2. To remove Indians from a possession which had just been assigned them in perpetuity. 3. To alter the Missouri compromise line in relation to slave territory, and thereby convert free soil into slave soil. The two first difficulties were serious—the third formidable: and in the then state of the public mind in relation to slave territory, this enlargement of a great slave State, and by converting free soil into slave, and impairing the compromise line, was an almost impossible undertaking, and in no way to be accomplished without a generous co-operation from the members of the free States. They were a majority in the House of Representatives, and no act of Congress could pass for altering the compromise line without their aid: they were equal in the Senate, where treaty for the removal of the Indians could be ratified except by a concurrence of two thirds. And all these difficulties to be overcome at a time when Congress was inflamed with angry debates upon abolition petitions, transmission of incendiary publications, imputed designs to abolish slavery; and the appearance of the criminating article in South Carolina entitled the "Crises," announcing a Southern convention and a secession if certain Northern States did not suppress the abolition societies within their limits within a limited time.
In the face of all these discouraging obstacles the two Missouri senators, Messrs. Benton and Linn, commenced their operations. The first was to procure a bill for the alteration of the compromise line and the extension of the boundary: it was obtained from the Judiciary Committee, reported by Mr. John M. Clayton of Delaware: and passed the Senate without material opposition. It went to the House of Representatives; and found there no serious opposition to its passage. A treaty was negotiated with the Sac and Fox Indians to whom the country had been assigned, and was ratified by the requisite two thirds. And this, besides doing an act of generous justice to the State of Missouri, was the noble answer which Northern members gave to the imputed design of abolishing slavery in the States! actually extending it! and by an addition equal in extent to such States as Delaware and Rhode Island; and by its fertility equal to one of the third class of States. And this accomplished by the extraordinary process of altering a compromise line intended to be perpetual, and the reconversion of soil which had been slave, and made free, back again from free to slave. And all this when, had there been the least disposition to impede the proper extension of a slave State, there were plausible reasons enough to cover an opposition, in the serious objections to enlarging a State already the largest in the Union—to removing Indians again from a home to which they had just been removed under a national pledge of no more removals—and to disturbing the compromise line of 1820 on which the Missouri question had been settled; and the line between free and slave territory fixed for national reasons, to remain for ever. The author of this View was part and parcel of all that transaction—remembers well the anxiety of the State to obtain the extension—her joy at obtaining it—the gratitude which all felt to the Northern members without whose aid it could not have been done; and whose magnanimous assistance under such trying circumstances he now records as one of the proofs—(this work contains many others)—of the willingness of the non-slaveholding part of the Union to be just and generous to their slaveholding brethren, even in disregard of cherished prejudices and offensive criminations. It was the second great proof to this effect at this identical session, the ratification of the Georgia Cherokee treaty being the other.