attended by 65 delegates from 18 states. Their platform demanded that Congress should neither erect another slave territory nor admit another slave state. It declared that the party would "fight on and fight ever" under the banner inscribed "Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men," until "triumphant victory" should reward its exertions. The old Liberty (Abolitionist) party merged with the Free-Soilers, its candidate, J. P. Hale, withdrawing in favor of Van Buren. The coalition of the Barnburners and the Free-Soilers was strong enough to defeat the regular Democratic candidate in the pivotal state of New York and to give the 36 electoral votes of that state, and therewith the election, to General Taylor.1 In Congress too the Free-Soilers won a commanding position, their 13 members holding the balance of power between the 112 Democrats and the 105 Whigs.

Yet the election as a whole was without significance. It marked rather a dead center in the revolution of political events. The old issues of Bank, tariff, currency, internal improvements, were worn threadbare. The lines of the new struggle over slavery and the territories were not yet clearly drawn. Each party was looking for votes wherever they could be found-the Whigs with a Southern slaveholder whose military record commended him to the North; the Democrats with a Northern frontiersman whose views on slavery were not offensive to the South. Taylor carried seven free states and eight slave states; Cass carried eight free states and seven slave states. The separation of the sections and the disruption of the old parties had not yet come. The election of 1848 was, as Garrison truly says, "a contest without an issue.'

1 The popular vote in New York was 218,000 for Taylor, 120,000 for Van Buren, and 114,000 for Cass. In the electoral college Taylor had 163 votes to 127 for Cass.

2 Although the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the Oregon settlement, and the rising controversy over slavery in the territories absorb the attention of the historical student in the middle years of the decade 1840-1850, there are a number of interesting facts of secondary importance in politics and civics that may be recorded here: (1) By an act of June 25, 1842, the "general ticket" was done away with for congressional elections, and each member was

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

National conventions might dodge the issue of slavery, crying "Avaunt and quit my sight!" to the Wilmot Proviso, which rose with the persistency of Banquo's ghost before their eyes; Congress might adjourn, leaving the increasing population of New Mexico and California without a government; the new president, in his first inaugural message, might deprecate "the introduction of those exciting topics of a sectional character which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in the public mind," but all this was as futile as King Canute's injunction to the rising tide. The people at large were convinced that a crisis was at hand in the slavery question and that it must be met. Our country threatened to separate into warring factions. The very protestations of orators North and South in their utter devotion to our priceless Union show how great the danger to that Union was.

At the North the principle of the Wilmot Proviso was gaining converts with each rejection by Congress. Its advocates were determined that the acquisitions of the Mexican War should bring no profit to slavery. The abolitionists redoubled their efforts, planting new societies, establishing newspapers and debating clubs, and circulating a great amount of propagandist literature and pictures. Legislatures and conventions in the free states passed scores of resolutions upholding the Proviso, and petitions for its adoption poured in upon Congress in an unbroken stream. The South was equally firm in its opposition. returned to the House from a single congressional district. (2) In 1844 the clectric telegraph was first used to report the proceedings of the national convention, and Silas Wright of New York had the unique experience of declining the presidential nomination when it was offered to him. (3) By an act of January 23, 1845, a uniform day-the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November-was prescribed for the choosing of presidential electors. (4) In March, 1845, both Houses of Congress for the first time passed a bill over the president's veto. (5) On March 3, 1845, Iowa and Florida were authorized to frame constitutions for admission to the Union. (6) The Walker tariff of 1846 began the series of relatively low tariff rates which lasted until the Civil War. (7) In August, 1846, the Independent Treasury system, which also lasted until the Civil War, was reestablished.

An address was drawn up by Calhoun and signed by 48 members of Congress, demanding that abolitionist agitation should cease, that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters, and that the new territory be freely opened to the emigration of the slaveholders. A mass meeting held in Kentucky requested Henry Clay to resign his seat in the Senate, because he had written a letter recommending a plan of gradual emancipation for the slaves of the state. Resolutions voted by a large majority in the legislature of Virginia declared that in the case of the adoption and attempted enforcement of the Wilmot Proviso "the sovereign people of Virginia" would not hesitate in the choice between "abject submission to aggression and outrage" and "determined resistance at all hazards and to the last extremity." The toast "a Southern confederacy" was hailed with cheers at a dinner to Senator Butler of South Carolina in April, 1849. As usual in times of great crises, the influence of the radicals on both sides tended to carry along the majority of the moderates, who in the North feared the reproach of favoring secession and in the South abhorred the suspicion of condoning abolition.

When Polk's final Congress adjourned in the spring of 1849 without having made any provision for the government of the territory acquired from Mexico, Senator Benton advised the Californians to form a government for themselves. There was pressing need for such action. Gold had been discovered in the Sacramento valley in January, 1848, and the next year saw the swarming of the "forty-niners" into California. Thousands came by wagon across the great plains of the West, braving starvation, exhaustion, the fever of the alkali wastes, and the danger of Indian attacks and leaving their telltale track of broken wagons, dead animals, and human bones. Other thousands came by sea, enduring the perils and buffetings of the six months' voyage around Cape Horn, the mariners' Nemesis, or crossing the pestilence-laden Isthmus of Panama on pack mules, to battle like crazy men for a place on the dirty, crowded, rickety steamers plying up the Californian coast. Mexicans, South Americans, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Chinamen rushed to the "diggings." Men fought over disputed claims

with revolver and bowie knife. Bandits plundered the convoys, Indians raided the settlements, and drunken ruffians terrorized the camps. There was no law or order. As the American immigrants gained in number over the "greasers" and the yellow men they determined to hold a convention for the establishment of a civil government. The convention met at Monterey, September 3, 1849, and framed a state constitution, excluding slavery by a unanimous vote, although one third of the members were from the Southern states. When Congress met in December, California, its population grown from 6000 to over 80,000, was asking admission to the Union as a free state. The people of New Mexico, meanwhile, had petitioned for organization as a non-slaveholding territory, claiming land to the east of the Rio Grande over which Texas had extended her authority.

President Taylor, although a Southerner and a slaveowner, became convinced on a visit to the New England states in the summer of 1849 that the South was the aggressor. He met the threats from South Carolina, Virginia, and Mississippi in the spirit of Andrew Jackson. He would answer the first overt act with a blockade of the Southern ports and call for volunteers from the free states. If necessary, he said, he "would pour out his blood for the defense of the Union." He was much under the influence of Senator Seward of New York, the leader of the antislavery Whigs. While not an advocate of the Wilmot Proviso himself, the President let it be known that he would do nothing to encourage the program of the Southern radicals. "The people of the North," he said in a speech in Pennsylvania, in August, 1849, "need have no apprehension of the further extension of slavery." His own plan was to admit California at once as a free state and establish territorial governments in New Mexico and Deseret (Utah) without any provision regarding slavery, leaving the people the choice when they should be ready for statehood.

The latter doctrine was known as "popular sovereignty," later nicknamed "squatter sovereignty," because it left the formation of communities with or without slavery to the people who "squatted," or settled, on the land while it was still the public

territory of the nation, without the power of a state to determine its municipal law by a regular constitution. The origin of the doctrine is generally ascribed to Lewis Cass, who elaborated it in a letter to a certain Mr. Nicholson of Nashville in December, 1847; but the principle had been discussed two years earlier in connection with the admission of the territory of Florida to statehood. Other possible solutions for the treatment of the territory acquired from Mexico were (1) the application of the Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery by act of Congress; (2) the extension of the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30' to the Pacific; (3) the full protection, by the national government, of the "property rights" of the slaveholder in the common territory of the Union (the Calhoun-Davis theory); and (4) the reference of the legality of slavery to the territorial courts, with appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. The first of these solutions was, of course, that of the abolitionists and the Free-Soilers of the North; the second was the original demand of the slavery advocates, soon, however, changed into the third; the fourth was summarily disposed of by Corwin's sarcastic comment.1

But the organization of the new territory was not the only vexed question with which Congress would have to deal. Northern agitators were persistently demanding the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the national District of Columbia. Northern legislatures were passing Personal-Liberty Acts, making the rendition of fugitive slaves to their masters extremely difficult. The "underground railroad" was aiding hundreds of these fugitives from the border states to escape across the free soil of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York to the Canadian border. And, finally, the legislatures, the press, the pulpits, the public platforms, of the South were insisting that the abolitionists must cease from their "taunts and insults," their self-righteous and meddling propaganda which encouraged servile insurrections, and must leave the South in peace to manage its own domestic institutions.

1 See page 440, note.