juncture, Texas, a province detached from Mexico, is admitted in the
quality of a slave State.

What happens then? The partisans of slavery, hampered by nothing any
longer, either by limits at the North, or limits at the South, or
provisos, or compromises, encounter, to their great horror, an obstacle
of quite a different nature. The local sovereignty which they have
invoked turns against them; in the Territory of Kansas, the majority
votes the exclusion of slavery. At once the Southerners change theory;
against local sovereignty they invoke the central power; they demand,
they exact that the decisions of the majority in Kansas shall be trodden
under foot; they put forward the natural right of slavery. Why shall
they be prevented from settling in a Territory with the slaves, their
property? When this Territory shall be by and by transformed into a
State, there will doubtless be a right to determine the question; but to
abolish slavery is quite a different thing from excluding it.

If the South did not win the cause this time, it was not the fault of
the government of the United States, but of the inhabitants of Kansas.
As for Mr. Buchanan, he showed himself what he has constantly been, the
most humble servant of the slavery party. They came together into
collision with _squatter sovereignty:_ they found for the first time in
their path that solid resistance of the West which was manifested in the
last election, and which, I firmly hope, is about to save America. But
in the mean time, they had taken a new step forward--a formidable step,
and one which introduced them into the very bosom of the free States:
they had obtained a decision from the Supreme Court--the Dred Scott
decree. In the preamble of this too celebrated decision, the highest
judicial power of the Confederation did not fear to proclaim two
principles: first, that there is no difference between a slave and any