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 LESTER BURRELL SHIPPEE

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and now doomed to wait a year longer. This is a strange and anomalous condition! almost incredible to contemplate; and almost critical to endure! a colony of freeman, 4,000 miles from the metropolitan government, and without laws But do not be alarmed or government to preserve them or desperate,, you will not be outlawed for not admitting Your fundamental act against that institution * slavery. will not be abrogated nor is that the intention of the Upon the record, the prime mover of the amendment. judiciary committee of the senate is the author of the amendment but not so the fact That committee is only the midwife to it. Its author is the same mind that generated the 'fire-brand' resolutions of which I send you a copy, and of which the amendment is the legitimate derivation. Oregon The most rabid propagandist of slavery is not the object. cannot expect to plant it on the shores of the Pacific, in the latitude of Wisconsin and the Lake of the Woods. A home agitation, for election and disunion purposes, is all that is intended by thrusting this fire-brand question into your !

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and, at the next session, when it is thrust in again, we scourge it out! and pass your bill as it ought to be. I promise you this in the name of the south as well as the north and the event will not deceive me." 14

bill

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will



Said the President, "I disapproved the

letter,

but knowing

(Benton's) domineering disposition and utter impatience of contradiction or difference of opinion, and knowing that I his

could not change his opinions, I contented myself with simply stating my objections to the letter and expressing my doubts

Nevertheless the next day Polk of sending such a letter." his decision; "I told him that to Benton reconsider urged

Oregon was a Northern Territory & that slavery could never exist there, that I condemned Mr. Calhoun's course, but this, I feared, would not be understood by the inhabitants of Oregon, who were far removed from newspapers and other sources of information." It would produce a mischievous excitement in Oregon where there would be alarm while, as those in Washington knew, there was no cause for it. Besides, said 14 Benton voiced similar sentiments when he was notified that the Democracy He thought a northern of Missouri desired him as their candidate for president. should be elected. Regsiter, 7 May, 1847.

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