Henry Clay's proposal of 1849 to provide for gradual emancipation in Kentucky was bitterly resented.

It had long been an axiom with the slavocracy that the institution would perish unless it had the opportunity to expand.

Out of this conviction arose Calhoun's famous theory that slaveowners had under the Constitution an equal right with the owners of all other forms of property in all the Territories.

The theory itself assumed that the act prohibiting slavery in the territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri was unconstitutional and void.

But this theory had not yet received judicial sanction, and the time was at hand when the question of freedom or slavery in the western territory was to be determined.
Between March and December, 1853, the discovery was made that the Act of 1850 organizing the Territories of New Mexico and Utah had superseded the Compromise of 1820; that a principle had been recognized applicable to all the Territories; that all were open to settlement on equal terms to slaveholders and non-slaveholders; that the subject of slavery should be removed from Congress to the people of the Territories; and that they should decide, either when a territorial legislature was organized or at the time of the adoption of a constitution preparatory to statehood, whether or not slavery should be authorized.