"These facts furnish a practical illustration of that great truth,
which ought to be familiar to all statesmen and politicians, that a
law passed by the national legislature to operate locally upon a
people not represented, will always remain practically a dead letter
upon the statute book, if it be in opposition to the wishes and
supposed interests of those who are to be affected by it, and at the
same time charged with its execution. The Ordinance of 1787 was
practically a dead letter. It did not make the country, to which it
applied, practically free from slavery. The States formed out of the
territory northwest of the Ohio did not become free by virtue of the
ordinance, nor in consequence of it ... [but] by virtue of their own
will."[347]

Douglas was equally convinced that the Missouri Compromise had had no
practical effect upon slavery. So far from depriving the South of its
share of the West, that Compromise had simply "allayed an unfortunate
excitement which was alienating the affections of different portions
of the Union." "Slavery was as effectually excluded from the whole of
that country, by the laws of nature, of climate, and production,
before, as it is now, by act of Congress."[348] As for the exclusion
of the South from the Oregon Territory, the law of 1848 "did nothing
more than re-enact and affirm the law which the people themselves had
previously adopted, and rigorously executed, for the period of twelve
years." The exclusion of slavery was the deliberate act of the people
of Oregon: "it was done in obedience to that great Democratic
principle, that it is wiser and better to leave each community to
determine and regulate its own local and domestic affairs in its own
way."[349]