Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bent, James" to "Bibirine" by Various
episode of 1832-1833. As the South under Calhoun's lead became
138 words | Chapter 5
increasingly sectional and aggressive, Benton increasingly lost sympathy
with her. Though he despised political inaction Abolitionists, and hated
their propaganda as inimical to the Union, he would not therefore close
the national mails to Abolition literature, nor abridge the right of
petition. No statesman was more prescient of the disunion tendencies of
Calhoun's policies, and as early as 1844 he prophetically denounced the
treason to the Union toward which the South was drifting. He would not
drift with her for the sake of slavery, and this was his political
undoing. In 1851 Missouri rejected him in his sixth candidacy for the
Senate, after he had been an autocrat in her politics for thirty years.
In 1852 he was elected to the House of Representatives, but his
opposition to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise caused his defeat in
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