In McLemore's History of Mississippi, Vol 1, page 431, Mclemore states, "In describing the last years of the antebellum South, Wiley P. Harris wrote: 'I had the uneasy feeling that the coil was tightening around the slave states and that was the general feeling with all thinking men in the South; but how to arrest the contraction I did not see.' " McLemore goes on to say, "This was an apt description of the plight of the slaveholding states. Everything the South did after 1856 seemed to be wrong. Even when it won victories they turned out to be of a Pyrric nature. A Case in point was the Supreme Court's decision of 1857, holding that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional because Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in a territory prior to statehood.