But when I go to
Union-saving, I must believe, at least, that the means I employ have some
adaptation to the end. To my mind, Nebraska has no such adaptation.
"It hath no relish of salvation in it."
It is an aggravation, rather, of the only one thing which ever endangers
the Union. When it came upon us, all was peace and quiet. The nation was
looking to the forming of new bends of union, and a long course of peace
and prosperity seemed to lie before us. In the whole range of
possibility, there scarcely appears to me to have been anything out of
which the slavery agitation could have been revived, except the very
project of repealing the Missouri Compromise. Every inch of territory we
owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question, by which
all parties were pledged to abide. Indeed, there was no uninhabited
country on the continent which we could acquire, if we except some
extreme northern regions which are wholly out of the question.
In this state of affairs the Genius of Discord himself could scarcely
have invented a way of again setting us by the ears but by turning back
and destroying the peace measures of the past. The counsels of that
Genius seem to have prevailed.
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