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406 The Slavery question. [1850 (1) that Texas should be paid ten million dollars to relinquish her claim upon a portion of New Mexico; () that California should be admitted as a State under a constitution which prohibited slavery; (3) that New Mexico and Utah should be organised as Territories without any regulation in respect of slavery, leaving it to the choice of their own settlers whether there should be property in slaves amongst them or not; (4) that the slave-trade should be excluded from the District of Columbia, but be interfered with nowhere else by Federal law ; and (5) that the whole judicial and administrative machinery of the Federal government should be put at the disposal of the Southern slave- owners for the recovery of fugitive slaves found within the Free States. Every measure in the list touched the politics of the time at some vital point. Fourteen years earlier (1836) Texas had established herself as an independent State by secession from Mexico, which Santa Anna had transformed from a republic into a military despotism ; and in 1845 she had been admitted with all her vast domain into the United States. Her admission into the Union had led almost immediately to war with Mexico (1846) ; for her southern boundary line was in dispute. The Federal government supported her claim to the tract of land which lies between the Nueces and the Rio Grande rivers, and by occupying it with an armed force compelled Mexico to fight for its possession. In the war which ensued, the forces of the United States took possession not only of the little region in dispute but also of all the Pacific slope from Oregon to Texas, Mexico's Territories towards the north. It was this war., and the acquisition of a new and vast domain on the Pacific, which had brought Congress once more face to face with the question, What shall be done with regard to slavery in the new Territories ? Shall its intro- duction be forbidden there, or permitted? And it was this question which had stirred parties and sections to the renewal of an old and bitter conflict, which threatened to disturb every ancient compromise and make peace and union infinitely difficult. It was a return to the question which politicians had hoped to have dismissed in the "Missouri Compromise" of 1820, when it had been agreed that Missouri should be admitted into the Union with a con- stitution which legalised slavery, but that thenceforth no other Slave State should be formed out of any territory of the United States which lay north of latitude 36 30', the southern boundary of Missouri extended ; but here was new territory to which that old compromise of a generation ago, it was said, did not apply. The question was as old, almost, as the Constitution itself. It had been touched first and most definitely by the notable Ordinance of 1787 a law as old as the Constitution which had decreed, once for all, that slavery should not enter the North-west Territory, the vast dominion made over by Virginia and her sister States to the Confederation which had fought the war for independence. But it was a matter which statutes could