worth more than a thousand Wilmot provisos. You have nature on your side-facts upon your side-and this truth staring you in the face that there is no slavery in those territories." The abolition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia Clay regarded as no concession, but as something on which both sides should unite. As to the failure to execute the fugitive-slave law, he thought the South had "serious cause of complaint against the free States"; but disunion would furnish no remedy for any southern grievance. He was "directly opposed to any purpose of secession, of separation"; he thought there was "no right on the part of one or more of the States to secede"; in the Union he meant "to stand and die." 1

On March 4 came the reply of Calhoun. The shadow of death was already upon him, and the speech which he was himself too ill to deliver was read by Senator Mason of Virginia; but the effect of the reading was enhanced by Calhoun's presence. He explained the discontent of the South as due to northern aggression, which had overthrown the equilibrium of the sections by excluding slavery from about three-fourths of the territory added to the original states; and by using a protective tariff to transfer wealth from South to North, with the effect of attracting immigration mainly to the latter, had changed the character of the United States government from a federal republic to a consoli1 Cong. Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 115-127.

1

dated democracy; and had begun to agitate the complete abolition of slavery. "Indeed," said he, "as events are now moving, it will not require the South to secede to dissolve the Union. Agitation will of itself effect it." The proposed compromise could not save the Union; nor could the "Executive proviso"-President Taylor's proposition-of allowing the people of the territories themselves to decide the question of slavery within their limits, which must result in its exclusion. The Union could be saved only "by conceding to the South an equal right in the acquired territory, . . . by causing the stipulations relative to fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled-to cease the agitation of the slave question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the Constitution, by an amendment, which... [would] restore to the South in substance the power she possessed of protecting herself, before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of this Government." 1

On March 7, 1850, was delivered the speech of Webster, beginning with a magnificent exordium: "Mr. President, I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the West, the North, and the stormy South, all combine to throw the whole ocean into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies, and

1 Cong. Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., 451-455.

to disclose its profoundest depths. . . . I have a duty to perform, and I mean to perform it with fidelity -not without a sense of surrounding dangers, but not without hope. I speak to-day for the preser

vation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.'. . . He then gave a historical review of slavery, referring to the expectation prevailing in the earlier years of the United States that when the importation of slaves ceased the institution would begin to die away, and showing how the prospect was changed by the development of cotton culture. He had his humorous fling at the northern Democrats who had voted "to bring in a world here, among the mountains and valleys of California and New Mexico, or any other part of Mexico, and then quarrel about it-to bring it in, and then endeavor to put upon it the saving grace of the Wilmot proviso."

Nature, he claimed, had excluded slavery from the acquired territory; and in oft-quoted words, upon the framing of a territorial government for New Mexico, he said: "I would not take pains to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to reenact the will of God. And I would put in no Wilmot proviso, for the purpose of a taunt or a reproach." As to the return of fugitive slaves, he thought "that the South is right, and the North is wrong"; but this was the only southern grievance that could be redressed by Congress. Peaceable secession was impossible, and he prayed his hearers to come out

from such "caverns of darkness" into "the fresh air of liberty and union." 1

March 11, 1850, Seward, addressing the Senate in relation especially to the status of California, was naturally led to cover the whole ground of the proposed compromise. He was opposed to it because he thought "all legislative compromises radically wrong and essentially vicious." Quoting the fugitive-slave provision of the Constitution, he asserted: "The law of nations disavows such compacts; the law of nature, written on the hearts and consciences of freemen, repudiates them." "It is true, indeed," said he, "that the national domain is ours; it is true, it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation; but we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. . . . The Constitution regulates our stewardship; the Constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defence, to welfare, and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purpose." He denied that the Constitution recognized chattel slavery, and averred that there was "no climate uncongenial to slavery," and that the Wilmot Proviso was necessary for its exclusion from New Mexico and California."

Chase's speech, delivered March 26 and 27, declared the duty of Congress to be non-interference

1 Cong. Globe, 31 Cong., I Sess., App., 269-276.

2 Ibid., App., 262-269.

with slavery in the states and prohibition in the territories. He agreed with Seward that the Constitution did not recognize chattel slavery, and he characterized the temporary protection extended by the Constitution to the slave-trade as "the first fruit of intimidation on the one side, and concession and compromise on the other." The three-fifths rule of slave representation he declared to be one reason for the attachment of the South to its peculiar domestic institutions. But for the Northwest Ordinance, he claimed, all the states west of the Alleghanies would have had slavery; and he endeavored to show that the slave states, instead of getting less than their share of acquired territory, as Calhoun argued, had received far more. The cry of disunion he regarded as "stale," and it did not alarm him.1

Webster has been freely charged by the zealous anti-slavery men of those and later days with sacrificing his conscience to his desire for the presidency; but it is doubtful whether those from whom the charge has come have fully understood his real character or the real significance of his career.❜ The mission which he felt the circumstances of his era had committed to him was to defend the Union till the bonds had grown too strong to break.

'Cong. Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., App., 468-480; Hart, Chase, 125-130.

For a sympathetic view, see Rhodes, United States, I., 137– 161; distinctly partisan, Curtis, Webster, II., 402–433.