—The second provided that no further acquisition of territory should be made except by the consent of a majority of all the senators from the slave-holding States and a majority of all the senators from the free States.
—The third declared that no amendment to the Constitution shall be made interfering with Slavery in the States, nor shall Congress prohibit it in the District of Columbia, nor interfere with the inter-State slave-trade, nor place any higher rate of taxation on slaves than upon land. At the same time it abolished the slave- trade in the District of Columbia.
—The fourth provided that no construction of the Constitution shall prevent any of the States aiding, by appropriate legislation, in the arrest and delivery of fugitive slaves.
—The fifth forever prohibited the foreign slave-trade.
—The sixth declared that the amendments to the Constitution herein proposed shall not be abolished or changed without the consent of all the States.
—The seventh provided for the payment from the National Treasury for all fugitive slaves whose recapture is prevented by violence.
These propositions met with little favor in either branch of Congress. Mr. Crittenden, finding that he could not pass his own resolutions, endeavored to substitute these, but could induce only six senators to concur with him. In the House there was no action whatever upon the report. The venerable Ex-President was chosen to preside over the deliberations of the conference, but was understood not to approve the recommendations. Far as they went, they had not gone far enough to satisfy the demands of Virginia, and still less the demands of the States which had already seceded. It is a curious circumstance that one of the delegates from Pennsylvania, Mr. J. Henry Puleston, was not a citizen of the United States, but a subject of Queen Victoria, and is now (1884), and has been for several years, a member of the British Parliament.
To complete the anomalies and surprises of that session of Congress, it is necessary to recall the fact, that, with a Republican majority in both branches, Acts organizing the Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada were passed without containing a word of prohibition on the subject of slavery. From the day that the administration of Mr. Polk began its career of foreign acquisition, the question of slavery in the Territories had been a subject of controversy between political parties. When the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the Territories of the United States north of the line of 36° 30´ were left without slavery inhibition or restriction, the agitation began which ended in the overthrow of the Democratic party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States. It will therefore always remain as one of the singular contradictions in the political history of the country, that, after seven years of almost exclusive agitation on this one question, the Republicans, the first time they had the power as a distinctive political organization to enforce the cardinal article of their political creed, quietly and unanimously abandoned it. And the abandoned it without a word of explanation. Mr. Sumner and Mr. Wade and Mr. Chandler, the most radical men in the Senate on the Republican side, sat still and allowed the bill to be passed precisely as reported by James S. Green of Missouri, who had been the ablest defender of the Breckinridge Democracy in that body. In the House, Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, Mr. Owen Lovejoy, the Washburns, and all the other radical Republicans vouchsafed no word explanatory of this extraordinary change of position.
COLORADO, DAKOTA, AND NEVADA.
If it be said in defense of this course that all the Territories lay north of 36° 30´, and were therefore in no danger of slavery, it only introduces fresh embarrassment by discrediting the action of the Republican party in regard to Kansas, and discrediting the earnest and persistent action of the anti-slavery Whigs and Free- Soilers, who in 1848 successfully insisted upon embodying the Wilmot Proviso in the Act organizing the Territory of Oregon. Surely, if an anti-slavery restriction were needed for Oregon, it was needed for Dakota which lay in the same latitude. Beyond doubt, if the Territory of Kansas required a prohibition against slavery, the Territory of Colorado and the Territory of Nevada, which lay as far south, needed it also. To allege that they could secure the President's approval of the bills in the form in which they were passed, and that Mr. Buchanan would veto each and every one of them if an anti-slavery proviso were embodied, is to give but a poor excuse, for, five days after the bills received the Executive signature, Mr. Buchanan went out of office, and Abraham Lincoln was installed as President.