Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bent, James" to "Bibirine" by Various

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