on the overthrow of the authority of the Mexican government by
American arms, the laws and constitution of Mexico were extinguished
and those of the United States, so far as applicable, occupied the
vacant field; that the Federal Constitution carried slavery with
it wherever it went, except where by the laws of a sovereign State
it was excluded.

He announced the proposition afterwards established by the Supreme
Court, that, as the Constitution proprio vigore carried slavery
into all the Territories, neither the territorial legislatures nor
Congress itself had power to interfere with the right of holding
slaves within them.

Webster conclusively answered this refined sophistry, pointing
out that slavery was merely a municipal institution, in derogation
of the common right of mankind, against the native instincts of
humanity, dependent wholly for its right of existence upon local
legislation, and that the real demand of the people of the South
was not to carry their slaves into the new Territories, but to
carry with them the slave codes of their several States.

While the venerable leaders who had ruled Congress and swayed public
opinion for thirty years were uttering philosophic disquisitions
on constitutional law or the ethics of slavery, Douglas had with
practical sagacity offered an amendment to the Oregon bill, extending
the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific. This would not
decide the great moral question between those who believed slavery
an unmixed good and those who believed it the sum of all villainies.
But he thought that moral ideas had no place in politics. It would
not decide the great question of constitutional law between those