“This mementous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” he wrote after the congressional vote on this Missouri Compromise. “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Such a division, he added, amounted to an “act of suicide on themselves and of treason against the hopes of the world.”
