Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/159

Rh under it in the same manner as the Northwestern States. The opposition to their petition came from the representatives and senators of the slave states, who saw in the rapid increase of northern free states a loss of the balance of power in congress, and the threatened destruction of slavery, or of the Union. The struggle had been begun a quarter of a century earlier, when by a compromise between the north and south, Missouri had been admitted as a slave state under a compact that no more slave states should be organized north of the parallel of 36° 30´.

The prospect of a large body of free states being formed above that line, extending even to the Pacific, was one to which southern senators opposed their most skilled diplomacy, their object being to gain time, by statecraft or otherwise, to extend slave territory westward at an equal rate. But the friends of Oregon in congress, who cared not overmuch about the question of slavery or of free soil, were touched by the fidelity to the government of the United States of the Oregon settlers, and anxious to have them rewarded as congress had, year after year, proposed to do—by liberal donations of land. The Linn bill had done its work in populating the Wallamet Valley, and the population of this valley had determined the title to the country. So much was granted. Thomas H. Benton had written his congratulations on the settlement of the boundary, and promised the early organization of the territory under the most favorable conditions. President Polk had spoken most flatteringly of the loyalty and patriotism of the pioneers. Stephen A. Douglas had drawn up a bill containing everything for which the pioneers had ever asked, and something more. That something more was the thirty-sixth section of land in every township for school purposes, in addition to the sixteenth.