and South Carolina and Louisiana that such things were possible—­were constantly occurring?  The circumstance made a strong impression on the State whose rights were thus grossly violated.  It helped to convert Massachusetts to its later opposition to slavery, and to make its public sentiment more tolerant of the Garrisonian opposition to the covenant with death and the agreement with hell.  To the agitation growing out of the scheme for the annexation of Texas must, however, be ascribed the premium among all the anti-Union working facts and forces of the first few years after Garrison and his coadjutors had raised the cry of “No union with slaveholders.”  This agitation renewed the intensity and sectionalism of the then almost forgotten struggle over the admission of Missouri nearly a quarter of a century before, and which was concluded by the Missouri compromise.  This settlement was at the time considered quite satisfactory to the South.  But Calhoun took an altogether different view of the matter twenty years later.  The arrangement by which the South was excluded from the upper portion of the Louisiana Territory he came to regard as a cardinal blunder on the part of his section.  The fact is that within those two decades the slave-holding had been completely outstripped by the non-slave-holding States in wealth, population, and social growth.  The latter had obtained over the former States an indisputable supremacy in those respects.  Would not the political balance settle also in the natural order of things in the Northern half of the Union unless it could be kept where it then was to the south of Mason and Dixon’s line by an artificial political make-weight.  This artificial political make-weight was nothing less than the acquisition of new slave territory to supply the demand for new slave States.  Texas, with the territorial dimensions of an empire, answered the agrarian needs of the slave system.  And the South, under the leadership of Calhoun, determined to make good their fancied loss in the settlement of the Missouri controversy by annexing Texas.

But all the smouldering dread of slave domination, all the passionate opposition to the extension of slavery, to the acquisition of new slave territory and the admission of new slave States, awoke hotly in the heart of the North.  “No more slave territory.”  “No more slave States,” resounded during this crisis, through the free States.  “Texas or disunion,” was the counter cry which reverberated through the slave States.  Even Dr. Channing, who had no love for Garrison or his anti-slavery ultraism, was so wrought upon by the scheme for the annexation of Texas as to profess his preference for the dissolution of the Union, “rather than receive Texas into the Confederacy.”  “This measure, besides entailing on us evils of all sorts,” the doctor boldly pointed out, “would have for its chief end to bring the whole country under the slave-power, to make the general Government the agent of slavery; and this we are bound to resist at all hazards.  The free States should declare that the very act of admitting Texas will be construed as a dissolution of the Union.”