main point with the votes of several Northern men, known to history as
the "Dough-faces," who all lost their seats at the next election.
Missouri was admitted as a slave State, Maine about the same time as a
free State; and it was enacted that thereafter in the remainder of the
territory that had been bought from France slavery should be unlawful
north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, while by tacit agreement
permitted south of it.

This was the Missouri Compromise. The North regarded it at first as a
humiliation, but learnt to point to it later as a sort of Magna Carta for
the Northern territories. The adoption of it marks a point from which it
became for thirty-four years the express ambition of the principal
American statesmen and the tacit object, of every party manager to keep
the slavery question from ever becoming again a burning issue in
politics. The collapse of it in 1854 was to prove the decisive event in
the career of Abraham Lincoln, aged 11 when it was passed.


5. _Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth_.

Just about the year 1830, when Lincoln started life in Illinois, several
distinct movements in national life began or culminated. They link
themselves with several famous names.

The two leaders to whom, as a young politician, Lincoln owed some sort of
allegiance were Webster and Clay, and they continued throughout his long
political apprenticeship to be recognised in most of America as the great
men of their time. Daniel Webster must have been nearly a great man. He
was always passed over for the Presidency. That was not so much because
of the private failings which marked his robust and generous character,