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two “Trample upon your hosannas to the Union” Keitt’s career in the House of Representatives coincided almost exactly with the struggle between North and South for control of Kansas. He arrived in Washington late in 1853, in time to throw himself into the fight over the organization of the territory. Seven years later, when he resigned his seat and led South Carolina out of the Union, the English Compromise was only eighteen months old.1 During the years when the outcome was in doubt, he played a conspicuous and frequently destructive role in the struggle, consciously sacrificing the nation’s peace and prosperity to a vain attempt to safeguard what he believed were the vital interests of his state and section. His inflammatory rhetoric, enormously effective on the floor of the House or on the stump, contributed immeasurably to the growth of sectional hostilities.2 Keitt went off to Washington determined to speak his mind regardless of whom he might offend and to avoid tying himself to any party or platform. At the start of the session, most Democrats supported Linn Boyd of Kentucky for Speaker of the House. All but one of the delegates from South Carolina supported James L. Orr, a conditional Unionist from Anderson District in the mountainous northwest corner of the state. Orr had led the opposition to secession in 1852, and Keitt refused to vote for him and instead supported John S. Millson of Virginia.3 In January 1854, before he was comfortably settled in his rooms at Flint’s Hotel—on E Street, just off Pennsylvania Avenue—or in his seat at the rear of the House,4 Stephen A. Douglas introduced into the Senate a bill to organize the Nebraska Territory. Douglas, the junior senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for president, was an outspoken advocate of westward expansion and popular sovereignty. Organization of the territory would clear the way for construction of south carolina fire-eater 20 an intercontinental railroad west from Chicago, encourage settlement, and ensure his future prosperity. For a territorial bill to pass the Congress, it had to attract the support of the South, and to do that, it had somehow to surmount the barrier to the expansion of slavery erected by the Missouri Compromise. Douglas first tried to solve the problem by pushing it aside and pretending it did not exist. In its original form, his bill provided that the territory would enter the Union with or without slavery as its constitution prescribed. Southern congressmen realized that the proposal would exclude slaves until the territory applied for statehood and, led by Senator David Atchison of Missouri and the F Street Mess, forced Douglas to amend the bill, first by granting the people of the territory the right to decide the question, and then by declaring the compromise “inoperative and void” and opening the area north of 36° 30' to settlement by slaveholders. Finally, Douglas divided the territory in two, implying that one would be settled by Free Soilers and the other by slaves and slave owners.5 Administration support and a large, well-disciplined Democratic majority made it virtually certain that, even in the face of a ferocious assault by “Independent Democrats,” the measure would sooner or later pass the Senate. Early in March, it did. In the House, however, victory was far from assured. Northern Free Soilers, convinced that the “Slave Power” was conspiring to extend its boundaries simultaneously southward into the Caribbean and westward into the plains, reacted in fear and anger. The product of an outburst of moral indignation reinforced by political and economic self-interest and encouraged by editors and clergymen as well as politicians, opposition to the bill rapidly gained momentum. Public opinion had no real influence in the Senate, where northern Democrats remained loyal to their party, but in the House it threatened to destroy the Democratic majority and block organization of the territories.6 The frenzied northern reaction contrasted initially with southern indifference . In the South radicals had long regarded the Missouri Compromise as a studied insult. Most of them feared that Missouri, surrounded on three sides by Free Soil, would in time be lost to slavery. Loss of the state would contract the boundaries of the South, reduce its influence in Congress, and divert trade that now flowed south toward New Orleans eastward into Chicago. They believed Douglas’s bill did not do enough to protect slavery in the territories, and assumed that slave owners would not carry...

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