in favor of “easy money,” if not paper currency, as an aid in the repayment of their debts.  This threw most of them into opposition to the Whig program for a United States Bank.  All financial aids to American shipping they stoutly resisted, preferring to rely upon the cheaper service rendered by English shippers.  Internal improvements, those substantial ties that were binding the West to the East and turning the traffic from New Orleans to Philadelphia and New York, they viewed with alarm.  Free homesteads from the public lands, which tended to overbalance the South by building free states, became to them a measure dangerous to their interests.  Thus national economic policies, which could not by any twist or turn be confined to state control, drew the slave system and its defenders into the political conflict that centered at Washington.

=Slavery and the Territories—­the Missouri Compromise (1820).=—­Though men continually talked about “taking slavery out of politics,” it could not be done.  By 1818 slavery had become so entrenched and the anti-slavery sentiment so strong, that Missouri’s quest for admission brought both houses of Congress into a deadlock that was broken only by compromise.  The South, having half the Senators, could prevent the admission of Missouri stripped of slavery; and the North, powerful in the House of Representatives, could keep Missouri with slavery out of the union indefinitely.  An adjustment of pretensions was the last resort.  Maine, separated from the parent state of Massachusetts, was brought into the union with freedom and Missouri with bondage.  At the same time it was agreed that the remainder of the vast Louisiana territory north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30’ should be, like the old Northwest, forever free; while the southern portion was left to slavery.  In reality this was an immense gain for liberty.  The area dedicated to free farmers was many times greater than that left to the planters.  The principle was once more asserted that Congress had full power to prevent slavery in the territories.

[Illustration:  THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE]

=The Territorial Question Reopened by the Wilmot Proviso.=—­To the Southern leaders, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexico meant renewed security to the planting interest against the increasing wealth and population of the North.  Texas, it was said, could be divided into four slave states.  The new territories secured by the treaty of peace with Mexico contained the promise of at least three more.  Thus, as each new free soil state knocked for admission into the union, the South could demand as the price of its consent a new slave state.  No wonder Southern statesmen saw, in the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexico, slavery and King Cotton triumphant—­secure for all time against adverse legislation.  Northern leaders were equally convinced that the Southern prophecy was true.  Abolitionists and moderate opponents of slavery alike were in despair.  Texas, they lamented, would fasten slavery upon the country forevermore.  “No living man,” cried one, “will see the end of slavery in the United States!”