Cass of Michigan for President, and William O. Butler of Kentucky for Vice President. Cass was a man with an interesting record. We first meet him in the War of 1812. He was a young officer under Hull at the surrender of Michigan, and rather than surrender his sword to the British officer, he broke it across a stone. After the war he became governor of Michigan Territory and Lewis Cass. held the post for eighteen years. Seeing that Detroit would grow into a city, he purchased a large farm just outside the village, and as the town expanded the farm grew in value until its owner became a millionaire.1 Next we find Cass in the Cabinet of Jackson, then minister to France, and finally in the United States Senate. But Cass lacked one of the most essential qualities of the modern politician-he was, like General Scott, self-conscious, urbane, and he held himself aloof from the vulgar crowd. Nevertheless Cass would probably have been elected but for the defection of his old enemy and rival, Martin Van Buren. The Democrats of New York were divided into two factions, the Hunkers and the Barnburners. The latter were not in sympathy with the slave propagandists; they refused to support Cass, joined the Free-soilers, and nominated a third ticket with Van Buren at its head. Van Buren did not love Cass, nor had he forgiven the party for choosing Polk instead of himself four years before. But at that time his great benefactor of Tennessee was still living, and this fact probably held the New Yorker in line with his party. But now Jackson was dead, and Van Buren took the opportunity to take vengeance on the party. He was quite successful. His personal following in his own state was sufficient to split the party almost in the middle and to give the electors to Taylor; and New York was again the pivotal state and decided the election.

Van Buren.

ZACHARY TAYLOR

Zachary Taylor was a soldier and only a soldier. Of the wiles of the politician, of the wonderful machinery of party organization, he was as ignorant as a child. Of the vast responsibility of the presidency he knew almost nothing. But withal he was a rugged, powerful, honest personality. He loved his country above all things,

1 Had Cass been elected, he would be, thus far, our only millionaire President. It is a significant fact, in this age of colossal fortunes, that we have never had a very rich President.

SLAVERY AGITATION

539

and his motives were without a flaw. The son of a patriot who had fought in the Revolution, he was born in Virginia the year after General Clinton had evacuated New York. At an early age he entered the army and saw service through the War of 1812, and the Black Hawk and Seminole wars. Humbly he served his country for forty years, wholly unknown to fame until his sudden bound into prominence in the war with Mexico.

Cali

Scarcely was Taylor installed in the great office when the whole country turned to him for a solution of the momentous issue on which neither party had dared give expression in the campaign of the preceding year that involved in the Wilmot Proviso. fornia was now knocking for admission into the Union as a free state. As stated above, the discovery of gold had aided in settling the slavery question for the Southwest. The men who went to the mines were not slaveholders, though many were from the South. The slave owner must remain with his plantation and his family. The men who flocked to the coast were, for the most part, laborers, nor could they endure the thought of inviting the black bondsmen into their midst to become their comrades in the field of toil. When, therefore, the Californians, in the autumn of 1849, framed a state constitution, they excluded slavery from the soil by a unanimous vote. At this the South was deeply stirred. The war had been pressed to a finish by a southern President and by a Congress dominated by the South; the chief object had been to extend slave territory; and now to have the fairest portion of the newly acquired land snatched forever from their grasp was more than the slaveholders could bear. They turned with hopeful eyes to the new President. What would he do? He was a southern man, and he owned a large plantation and several hundred slaves in Louisiana. On this the hopes of the South were based, though Taylor had said that he would not be a sectional nor a partisan President. At length all doubts were set at rest when the President proved that his patriotism towered above his sectional or partisan feeling by recommending that California be admitted as a free state.

Unrest of the

The slave power now became enraged; it demanded that California be divided in the middle and that the southern half be made a slave state, or that the Missouri Compromise South. line be extended beyond its original limits, the Louisiana Purchase, to the Pacific Ocean. Threats of destroying the Union began to spread through the South. Alexander H. Stephens

wrote in December, 1849, that the feeling among the southern members for a dissolution of the Union was becoming far more general. Robert Toombs declared in the House that he did not hesitate "to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico . . . I am for disunion." Calhoun, the greatest of southern leaders, had made artful efforts to unite all slaveholders in Congress to demand concessions from the North and to foster the spirit of disunion, if their demand. was refused. Such was the condition of the country-California knocking for admission as a free state, the South demanding that it be divided in the middle, the North in equal turmoil, many of the people ready to yield to southern demands for the sake of peace, but a greater number declaring frantically that slavery should encroach no farther on free soil - such was the condition at the opening of that memorable year in American history,

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY

From the time of the launching of the government under the new Constitution to the Civil War the darkest year of all was 1850. There could be no doubt that the threat of wholesale secession was serious. A convention of leading southern statesmen met at Nashville in June, 1850, and solemnly declared that a state had the abstract right to secede from the Union. Not one lone state, as in 1832, but most of the slave states seemed to contemplate taking the fatal step. Had secession now been accomplished, our glorious Union would probably have perished. Jackson was in his grave and Lincoln was unknown; nor was there any great political party, as ten years later, pledged to the maintenance of its integrity. While the country was in this state of unrest the Thirty-first Congress met. The House chose Howell Cobb of Georgia speaker, after a wrangle of three weeks. The Senate was the ablest that ever sat in Washington. Here for the last time was the great triumvirate, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, all of whom had figured in every great governmental movement for forty years. Here, too, were Benton, serving his thir tieth year in the Senate, the stentorian Hale of New Hampshire,

The Senate.

1 Benton took the ground, however, and with some show of reason, that the bluster would subside, and that there was no serious danger to the Union.

GREAT DEBATES IN THE SENATE

541

Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois, and Jefferson Davis of Missis sippi; Seward of the Empire State, and the powerful pair from Ohio, Salmon P. Chase and Thomas Corwin. Early in the session Clay assumed the leadership, as always, and he brought forward a series of compromise measures which he hoped would restore harmony between the warring sections. These Clay's compromise. are known as the Compromise Measures of 1850, or the Omnibus Bill. In this famous bill were eight items, the most important being the first, which called for the admission of California as a free state; the sixth, which prohibited the slave trade in the District of Columbia; and the seventh, which called for a new fugitiveslave law. These measures absorbed the attention of Congress for more than eight months. The bill was eventually torn to pieces and passed in sections. Clay was the champion and leader throughout. He had passed his seventy-second year, and his health was broken; but the fire of his eloquence still glowed with the luster of former days. Clay was the most national, the broadest in his sympathies, of all men in Congress at this time. A resident of a border state and the owner of slaves, he was as truly a northern as a southern man. When Jefferson Davis declared in the Senate that the Missouri line must be extended to the Pacific, Clay's instant retort was that he could never agree to it, that the Southwest was free territory and must remain so, that we justly reproached our British ancestors for introducing slavery on this continent, and he was unwilling that the future inhabitants of California and New Mexico should reproach us for the same offense. Clay announced that on a certain day in February he would speak on his bill, and thousands. of people, many from distant cities, came to hear this last great speech of this most magnetic of American orators.

In March three speeches of much historic importance were delivered in the Senate, by Calhoun, Webster, and Seward. Calhoun was slowly dying; but his unconquerable will fought down disease until he had prepared an elaborate speech on the compromise measures. Supported by two friends, he tottered into the senate chamber; but he was unable to read his speech, and this was done by another. The utmost attention was paid to this final word from the greatest of the living sons of the South. In front of the reader sat, with half-closed eyes, in rigid silence, the ghostlike form of the author. Calhoun was an honest man, and in this speech he gave expression to the honest convictions of his soul. He

showed how the North, in his belief, had encroached on the rights of the South until the Union was in danger, how the great Protestant churches had separated into northern and southern Calhoun's branches, — how one cord after another that bound last speech. the two sections of the country together had snapped, and soon there would be none remaining. He appealed to the North to consent to amend the Constitution so as to give the South the power to protect herself. Thus ended the public career of the great South Carolinian. He died on the last day of March.

It is not true that Calhoun sought a dissolution of the Union. He probably loved his state and section more than the Union; and, believing that slavery was necessary to the welfare of his section, he espoused the cause of slavery. But as well say that Chatham, in defending the rights of the colonies, ceased to be a loyal Englishman, as that Calhoun no longer loved his country. And nothing in his life showed more conclusively that he still loved the flag than did this last great speech of his life, in which he pleads from the depths of his honest soul for the removal of the evils that in his judgment menaced the perpetuity of the Union.

Many and able were the other champions of the slave power during the generation preceding the Civil War; but Calhoun towers above them all. His prophetic vision exceeded that of any of his contemporaries. He saw the gathering storm, the implacable strife between the slave states and the free, long before it assumed threatening proportions. He saw, too, that the little, despised Abolition societies of the North would, by their unceasing cry against slavery, eventually mold the conscience of millions, and he called for their suppression by legislation. Calhoun was right in believing that if the moral consciousness of the nation opposed slavery, slavery must fall. But he made mistakes. He was wrong in believing that human legislation can govern the conscience of the people; wrong in predicting that the Union could not survive a bloody war; and strangest of all, he and all his brethren were wrong in their claim that social conditions in the South would be unendurable, if the black man were given his freedom.

The next great speech of the month was made by Daniel Webster,

1 It was not then known to what Calhoun referred in this suggestion; but his posthumous papers explained that he would have the Constitution amended so as to elect two Presidents, one from the slave states, and one from the free states, each to have a veto on all national legislation.