It is difficult at this distance from the event to appreciate how the
question of the right of slaveholders to introduce slaves into the
territories could have been the subject of such profound and
peace-destroying controversy. That few slaves would ever be carried
into the territories was a conclusion easily deducible from the
character of slave labor, and the climatic and soil conditions of most
of the Western prairies—especially after Southern California, which
would have furnished them a congenial home, had been admitted into the
Union as part of a free state.