The political situation might have continued unchanged for several years had not Stephen A. Douglas introduced in December, 1853, i" the Senate, the famous " Nebraska Bill," which affirmed that the Clay compromise of 1850 had repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Almost immediately the country .was in a ferment, and the anti-slavery Whigs found themselves able to enroll under the same banner with the Free Soil Democrats. The parties in the country now came to be distinguished as "Nebraska" or "anti-Nebraska." In Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854, the Republican party was born, the result of this last move of the slave power.
Here Seward distinguished himself. In the struggle for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he made a greater fight in 1854 than Rufus King had made in 1820 over the original enactment. It was Seward who answered arguments and marshaled the opposition; whose final great appeal concluded in words that few people at that time realized as fundamental truth: "The slavery agitation you deprecate so much is an eternal struggle between conservatism and progress; between truth and error, between right and wrong. . . . You may legislate arid abrogate and abnegate as you will, but there is a superior power that overrules all; that overrules not only all your actions and all your refusals to act, but all human events, to the distant, but inevitable result of the equal and universal liberty of all men."[1]
An anti-Nebraska State convention was held at Saratoga on August 16, 1854; Horace Greeley offered the resolutions and Raymond was a conspicuous figure. It was here that Greeley was doing his greatest work, in urging the formation of a new party made up of Whigs, Free Soilers and the anti-Nebraska Democrats; it was
- ↑ F. W. Seward, Life of W. H. Seward, ii, 221.
