Taken apart from the report, the bill might be interpreted as not in conflict with the Act of 1820, but taken with the report, it meant the repeal of the Act of 1820, and the attribution of all power over the question of slavery in the Territory to those who might squat upon its soil. Of course it was entirely within the power of Congress to repeal the Act of 1820. The restraints resting upon Congress in regard to this matter were moral, not legal. If Congress would, nevertheless, do it, it must do it in the form of a statute, and not in that of a report doubting the constitutionality of the Act, or even declaring it unconstitutional. It was entirely natural that the demand should be made for clearing the bill of its ambiguities.
| The new section. |
Before the demand came, however, the committee itself did something in this direction. When the bill was printed, on January 7th, it contained twenty sections. On the 10th, a revised edition of it appeared, which contained twenty-one sections. The last section was the dictum of the report in regard to the principles of the Measures of 1850 upon the subject of slavery in the Territories. The committee explained that it had been left out of the first draft by a clerical error. This change did not, however, clear the bill of all ambiguity. The added provision was declaratory only, and did not expressly repeal the Act of 1820.
| Mr. Dixon's proposed amendment. |
At length, on the 16th, Mr. Dixon, of Kentucky, gave notice to the Senate that he should move, as an amendment to the bill, a provision expressly repealing the Act of 1820 in so far as it prohibited slavery in any of the Territories of the United States.
| Mr. Blair's letter in reference to Mr. Seward's connection with Dixon's proposition. |
In a letter of May 17th, 1873, to Mr. Gideon Welles, Mr. Montgomery Blair wrote of Mr. Seward: "I shall never forget how shocked I was at his telling me that he was the man who put Archy Dixon, the Whig Senator from Kentucky in 1854, up to moving the repeal of the Missouri compromise, as an amendment to Douglas' first Kansas [Nebraska?] bill, and had himself forced the repeal by that movement, and had thus brought to life the Republican Party. Dixon was to out-Herod Herod at the South, and he was to out-Herod Herod at the North."