Both the leading political parties were, in the campaign of 1852, fully committed to the acceptance of the so-called Compromise of 1850 as a final settlement of the slavery question; both were committed to the support of the Fugitive Slave Act.The Free-soil party, with John P.Hale as its candidate, did make a vigorous attack upon the Fugitive Slave Act, and opposed all compromises respecting slavery, but Free-Boilers had been to a large extent reabsorbed into the Democratic party, their vote of 1852 being only about half that of 1848.Though the Whig vote was large and only about two hundred thousand less than that of the Democrats, yet it was so distributed that the Whigs carried only four States, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee.The other States gave a Democratic plurality.
Had there been time for readjustment, the Whig party might have recovered lost ground, but no time was permitted.There was in progress in Missouri a political conflict which was already commanding national attention.Thomas H.Benton, for thirty years a Senator from Missouri, and a national figure, was the storm-center.His enemies accused him of being a Free-Boiler, an abolitionist in disguise.He was professedly a stanch and uncompromising unionist, a personal and political opponent of John C.Calhoun.According to his own statement he had been opposed to the extension of slavery since 1804, although he had advocated the admission of Missouri with a pro-slavery constitution in 180.He was, from the first, senior Senator from the State, and by a peculiar combination of influences incurred his first defeat for reelection in 1851.
Benton's defeat in the Missouri Legislature was largely the result of national pro-slavery influences.In a former chapter, reference was made to the Ohio River as furnishing a "providential argument against slavery." The Mississippi River as the eastern boundary of Missouri furnished a like argument, but on the north not even a prairie brook separated free labor in Iowa from slave labor in Missouri.The inhabitants of western Missouri, realizing that the tenure of their peculiar institution was becoming weaker in the east and north, early became convinced that the organization of a free State along their western boundary would be followed by the abolition of slavery in their own State.This condition attracted the attention of the national guardians of pro-slavery interests.Calhoun, Davis, Breckinridge, Toombs, and others were in constant communication with local leaders.A certain Judge W.C.Price, a religious fanatic, and a pro-slavery devotee, was induced to visit every part of the State in 1844, calling the attention of all slaveholders to the perils of the situation and preparing the way for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.Senator Benton, who was approached on the subject, replied in such a way that all radical defenders of slavery, both national leaders and local politicians, were moved to unite for his political defeat.
David R.Atchison, junior Senator from Missouri, had been made the leader of the pro-slavery forces.The defeat of Benton in the Missouri Legislature did not end the strife.He at once became a candidate for Atchison's place in the election which was to occur in 1855, and he was in the meantime elected to the House of Representatives in 1852.The most telling consideration in Benton's favor was the general demand, in which he himself joined, for the immediate organization of the western territory in order to facilitate the building of a system of railways reaching the Pacific, with St.Louis as the point of departure.
