After Joseph Story's death on September 10, 1845, and therewith the passing of what he had called the “old race of judges,” the debates over the interpretation of the Constitution only continued to intensify. Just beneath the surface of those debates lay the grave political issue of the morality of chattel slavery, what James Madison had described in the Constitutional Convention as the “most material” difference between the states. It was not their size or their mere location that put them potentially at odds, but rather the effects of “their having or not having slaves.” This was what formed the “great division of interests” in the country. With the passing of the founding generation – those whom Thomas Jefferson fondly recalled as “the generation of 1776” – the constitutional reconciliation of the great conflict between slavery and freedom fell to their “sons” and to what Jefferson feared would prove to be their “unwise and unworthy passions.”

Jefferson had immediately seen the passage of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, an agreement meant to deal with the spread of slavery into the territories, as “a fire bell in the night,” an alarm that “awakened and filled [him] with terror.” He was convinced that such an effort to reduce the “moral and political” principle of freedom to a mere “geographical line,” as the compromise had done, only guaranteed that the “angry passions of men” would deepen the crisis.