The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in
1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which
have been selected to illustrate it. The admission of Texas to the Union
in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the
acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States.
From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso
(so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in
Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was
persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money
for the purchase of territory from Mexico. It was passed by the House
of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase
was finally made without any proviso. When the territory came to be
organized, the old question came up again: the Wilmot proviso was
offered as an amendment. As the territory was now in the possession of
the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support
had been much more cordial at the South than at the North, the attempt
to add the Wilmot proviso to the territorial organization raised the
Southern opposition to an intensity which it had not known before.
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