Mr. Calhoun had taught was inevitable.  But the hostility of Benton in the Senate was dreaded by the Southern leaders thus early conspiring against the integrity of the Union.  The Missouri senator seemed, of all cotemporaneous statesmen, to be the only one that fully comprehended the incipient treason.  His earnest opposition assumed at times the phases of monomania.  He sought to crush it in the egg.  He lifted his warning voice on all occasions.  He inveighed bitterly against the ‘Nullifiers,’ as he invariably characterized the Calhoun politicians, declaring that their purpose was to destroy the Union.  It became necessary, therefore, before attempting to dispose of the territories acquired from Mexico, to silence Benton, or remove him from the Senate.  Accordingly, when the legislature of Missouri met in 1849, a series of resolutions was introduced, declaring that all territory derived by the United States, in the treaty with Mexico, should be open to settlement by the citizens of all the States in common; that the question of allowing or prohibiting slavery in any territory could only be decided by the people resident in the territory, and then only when they came to organize themselves into a State government; and, lastly, that if the general government should attempt to establish a rule other than this for the settlement of the territories, the State of Missouri would stand pledged to her sister Southern States to co-operate in whatever measures of resistance or redress they might deem necessary.  The resolutions distinctly abdicated all right of judgment on the part of Missouri, and committed the State to a blind support of Southern ‘Nullification’ in a possible contingency.  They were in flagrant opposition to the life-long principles and daily vehement utterances of Benton—­as they were intended to be.  Nevertheless, they were adopted; and the senators of Missouri were instructed to conform their public action to them.  These resolutions were introduced by one Claiborne F. Jackson, a member of the House of Representatives from the County of Howard, one of the most democratic and largest slave-holding counties in the State.  The resolutions took the name of their mover, and are known in the political history of Missouri as the ‘Jackson resolutions.’  And Claiborne F. Jackson, who thus took the initiative in foisting treason upon the statute-books of Missouri, is, to-day, by curious coincidence, the official head of that State nominally in open revolt.  But Jackson, it was early ascertained, was not entitled to the doubtful honor of the paternity of these resolutions.  They had been matured in a private chamber of the Capitol at Jefferson City, by two or three conspirators, who received, it was asserted by Benton, and finally came to be believed, the first draft of the resolutions from Washington, where the disunion cabal, armed with federal power, had its headquarters.