The mutual congratulations indulged in by the Southern managers over the accomplishment of the pro-slavery program for territorial expansion, were interrupted by intelligence of the most startling character. Before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed, gold was discovered in the Sierras, and the occupation of California by emigrants, principally from the Northern States, was an immediate result. Thus, the conquest of Mexico—the prize trophy in the triumphal procession of pro-slavery events—carried with it, by the irony of fate, the Nemesis of her despoiled people. Within two years a Free State had been carved out of the Territory which the South had won for slavery.
The contests which were had over the admission of Missouri into the Union, and the annexation of Texas, were trivial in comparison with the storm that burst upon the Thirty-first Congress over the admission of California. The already strained relations between the North and the South reached the limits of tension; and but for the tabling of the "Wilmot Proviso," and the adoption of the "Compromise" measures, the cords that bound the Union would have snapped then and there. "The first weeks of the session were more than enough to show in its full breadth and depth, even to the duller eyes, the abyss that yawned between the North and the South."[65] "All the Union men, North and South, Whigs and Democrats, for the period of six months were assembled in caucuses every day, with Clay in the chair, Cass upon his right hand, Webster upon his left hand, and the Whigs and Democrats on either side."[66] It was during this debate that Mr. Seward announced the doctrine of the "higher law":
The Constitution regulates our stewardship; the Constitution devotes the domain (the territories not formed into states) 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 purposes.
Webster thus began his great speech:
I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American.... The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the North, and the stormy South combine to throw the whole sea into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies, and disclose its profoundest depths.... I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my Cause.[67]
Said Toombs of Georgia:
I do not then 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, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this district, thereby attempting to fix a National degradation upon half of the states of this confederacy I am for disunion, and if my physical courage be equal to the maintenance of my convictions of duty, I will devote all I am, and all I have on earth to its consummation.[68]
This speech was repeatedly interrupted by storms of applause. And Stephens, too, was greeted with loud acclamations when he announced his concurrence in every word of his colleague, and declared the Union dissolved from the moment an attack upon a section became an accomplished fact.
Colcock of South Carolina then announced that he would bring in a formal motion for the dissolution of the Union, as soon as the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia should have been resolved upon, or the Wilmot Proviso passed.[69] The compromise agreement was effected by the fine patriotism, the sagacity, and the personal sacrifice of two great figures of that generation: Clay and Webster. In promoting this measure, they exhausted their political resources, and forfeited their political fortunes. Neither of them could have been reëlected to the senate.
Nothing was settled by the compromise of 1850; both sides accepting it in a tentative way. "The present Crisis may pass," wrote Mr. Stephens in 1850,[70] "the present adjustment may be made, but the great question of permanence of slavery in the Southern states will be far from being settled thereby. And, in my opinion, the crisis of that question is not far ahead."