3. And demanded that the territories should be open to slavery.
A little later, in 1849, the legislature of Virginia adopted resolutions setting forth:
1. That "the attempt to enforce the Wilmot Proviso" would rouse the people of Virginia to "determined resistance at all hazards and to the last extremity."
2. That the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia would be a direct attack on the institutions of the Southern States.
The Missouri legislature protested against the principle of the Wilmot Proviso, and instructed her senators and representatives to vote with the slaveholding states. The Tennessee Democratic State Central Committee, in an address, declared that the encroachments of their Northern brethren had reached a point where forbearance ceased to be a virtue. At a dinner to Senator Butler, in South Carolina, one of the toasts was "A Southern Confederacy."
%376. State of Feeling in the North.%—Feeling in the free states ran quite as high.
1. The legislatures of every one of them, except Iowa,[1] resolved that Congress had power and was in duty bound to prohibit slavery in the territories.
[Footnote 1: Iowa had been admitted December 28, 1846.]
2. Many of them bade their congressmen do everything possible to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.
The struggle thus coming to an issue in the summer of 1849 was precipitated by a most unlooked-for discovery in California, which led the people of that region to take matters into their own hands.