Excitement and passion do not, however, always issue decrees and pronounce judgments of absolute right. In the zeal of that hour, Northern anti-slavery opinion failed to appreciate the influence which wrought so powerfully on the mind of Mr. Webster. He belonged with those who could remember the first President, who personally knew much of the hardships and sorrows of the Revolutionary period, who were born to poverty and reared in privation. To these, the formation of the Federal Government had come as a gift from Heaven, and they had heard from the lips of the living Washington in his farewell words, that "the Union is the edifice of our real independence, the support of our tranquillity at home, our peace abroad, our prosperity, our safety, and of the very liberty which we so highly prize, that for this Union we should cherish a cordial, habitual, immovable attachment, and should discountenance whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned." Mr. Webster had in his own lifetime seen the thirteen colonies grow into thirty powerful States. He had seen three millions of people, enfeebled and impoverished by a long struggle, increased eightfold in number, surrounded by all the comforts, charms, and securities of life. All this spoke to him of the Union and of its priceless blessings. He now heard its advantages discussed, its perpetuity doubted, its existence threatened. A convention of slave-holding States had been called, to meet at Nashville, for the purpose of considering the possible separation of the sections. Mr. Webster felt that a generation had been born who were undervaluing their inheritance, and who might, by temerity, destroy it. Under motives inspired by these surroundings, he spoke for the preservation of the Union. He believed it to be seriously endangered. His apprehensions were ridiculed by many who, ten years after Mr. Webster was in his grave, saw for the first time how real and how terrible were the perils upon which those apprehensions were founded.
When the hour of actual conflict came, every patriot realized that a great magazine of strength for the Union was stored in the teachings of Mr. Webster. For thirty years preceding the Nullification troubles in South Carolina, the government had been administered on the States'-rights theory, in which the power of the nation was subordinated, and its capacity to subdue the revolt of seceding States was dangerously weakened. His speech in reply to Hayne in 1830 was like an amendment to the Constitution. It corrected traditions, changed convictions, revolutionized conclusions. It gave to the friends of the Union the abundant logic which established the right and the power of the government to preserve itself. A fame so lofty, a work so grand, cannot be marred by one mistake, if mistake it be conceded. The thoughtful reconsideration of his severest critics must allow that Mr. Webster saw before him a divided duty, and that he chose the part which in his patriotic judgment was demanded by the supreme danger of the hour.
Mr. Clay's resolutions were referred to a special committee of thirteen, of which he was made chairman. They reported a bill embracing the principal objects contemplated in his original speech. The discussion on this composite measure was earnest and prolonged, and between certain senators became exasperating. The Administration, through its newspapers, through the declarations of its Cabinet minsters, through the unreserved expressions of President Taylor himself, showed persistent hostility to Mr. Clay's Omnibus Bill, as it was derisively and offensively called. Mr. Clay, in turn, did not conceal his hostility to the mode of adjustment proposed in the messages of the President, and defended his own with vigor and eloquence. Reciting the measures demanded for a fair and lasting settlement, he said there were five wounds, bleeding and threatening the body politic, all needing to be healed, while the President proposed to heal but one. He described the wounds, numbering them carefully on his fingers as he spoke. Colonel Benton, who was vindictively opposed to the Omnibus Bill, made sport of the five gaping wounds, and believed that Mr. Clay would have found more wounds if he had had more fingers. This strife naturally grew more and more severe, making for a time a somewhat serious division among the Democrats, and rending the Whig party asunder, one section following Mr. Clay with great zeal, the other adhering with tenacity to the administration.
DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOR.
The quarrel was growing fiercer day by day, and involving all shades of political opinion, when it was suddenly arrested by the death of General Taylor on the 9th of July (1850). This sad event gave the opportunity for the success of the Compromise measures. Had General Taylor lived, their defeat was assured. As a Southern man, coming from a Gulf State, personally interested in the institution of slavery, he had a vantage-ground in the struggle which a Northern President could never attain. He had, moreover, the courage and the intelligence to uphold his principles, even in a controversy with Mr. Clay. His ignorance of political and civil affairs has been grossly exaggerated. Without taking part in politics, he had been a close observer of events, and his prolonged services at frontier posts had afforded the leisure and enforced the taste for reading. He knew not only the public measures, but the public men of his time closely and appreciatively. He surprised a member of his cabinet on a certain occasion, by objecting to a proposed appointment on the ground that the man designated had voted for Benton's expunging resolution at the close of Jackson's administration, —an offense which the President would not condone. The seven members of his cabinet, actively engaged in politics all their lives, had forgotten an important fact which the President instinctively remembered.
Long before General Taylor's death it was known that Mr. Fillmore did not sympathize with the policy of the administration. He had been among the most advanced of anti-slavery Whigs during his service in the House of Representatives, and was placed on the Taylor ticket as a conciliatory candidate, to hold to their allegiance that large class of Whigs who resented the nomination of a Louisiana slave-holder. But from the day he was sworn in as Vice-President his antipathy to Mr. Seward began to develop. With the conceded ability of the latter, and with his constant opportunity on the floor of the Senate, where he won laurels from the day of his entrance, Mr. Fillmore felt that he would himself be subordinated and lost in the crowd of followers if he coincided with Seward. Older in years, long senior to Mr. Seward in the national service, he apparently could not endure to see himself displaced by a more brilliant and more capable leader. The two men, therefore, gradually separated; Mr. Fillmore using what influence he possessed as Vice- President in favor of Mr. Clay's plan of compromise, while Mr. Seward became the Northern leader of the Administration Whigs,—a remarkable if not unprecedented advance for a senator in the first session of his service.
In succeeding to the Presidency, Mr. Fillmore naturally gave the full influence of his administration to the Compromise. To signalize his position, he appointed Mr. Webster secretary of State, and placed Mr. Corwin of Ohio at the head of the Treasury. Mr. Corwin, with a strong anti-slavery record, had been recently drifting in the opposite direction, and his appointment was significant. It was too late, however, to save the Omnibus Bill as a whole. The Taylor administration had damaged it too seriously to permit an effectual revival in its favor. It was finally destroyed the last week in July by striking out in detail every provision except the bill for the organization of the Territory of Utah. After the Utah bill had been enacted, separate bills followed;—for the admission of California; for the organization of New Mexico, with the same condition respecting slavery which had been applied to Utah; for the adjustment of the Texas boundary, and the payment to that State of ten millions indemnity; for the more effectual recovery of fugitive slaves; for the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Congress thus enacted separately the bills which it refused to enact together, and the policy outlined by Mr. Clay at the beginning of the session had triumphed. Several Southern senators joined Jefferson Davis in strenuous resistance to the admission of California with the boundaries prescribed. After seeking ineffectually to make the line of 36° 30´ the southern limit of the State, they attempted with equal lack of success to enter a solemn protest on the journal of the Senate against the wrong done to the slave-holding States in giving the entire Pacific coast to freedom. It was a last and hopeless movement of the Southern Hotspurs. The protest, at first discredited, was speedily forgotten, and California entered the Union after ten months of angry controversy, with slavery forever excluded from her imperial domain.
THE FINALITY OF THE COMPROMISE.
The session had been in all respects important and memorable. In the judgment of many it had been critical, and the dangers attending its action were increased by the death of General Taylor. The South would endure from him what they would resent and possibly resist if imposed by an anti-slavery Whig from the North. This fact had, doubtless, great influence in shaping the policy of Mr. Fillmore, both as Vice-President and President. The events of the session marred and made the reputation of many. Four senators especially, of the younger class, had laid the foundation of their prominence in the struggles of after years,—Mr. Seward as an anti- slavery Whig, Mr. Chase as a Free-Soiler, previously of Democratic affiliations, Mr. Jefferson Davis as a Southern Democrat, and Mr. Douglas as a Northern Democrat. Calhoun was dead. Clay and Webster and Cass and Benton were near the end of their illustrious careers. New men were thenceforth to guide the policy of the Republic, and among the new men in a Senate of exceptional ability these four attained the largest fame, secured the strongest constituencies, and exerted the widest influence.
Both political parties began at once to take ground in favor of the Compromise measures as a final and complete adjustment of the slavery question. The Southern Whigs under Mr. Clay's lead eagerly assumed that conclusion. Mr. Fillmore, having approved all the bills separately which taken together formed the Compromise, was of course strongly in favor of regarding these measures as a finality. Mr. Webster took the same view, though from a bill he had prepared before he left the Senate for the rendition of fugitive slaves, guaranteeing jury-trial to the fugitive, it is hardly conceivable that he would have voted for the harsh measure that was enacted. Mr. Corwin to the surprise of his friends had passed over from the most radical to the ultra-conservative side on the slavery question, and it was his change, in addition to that of Mr. Webster, which had given so brilliant an opportunity to Mr. Seward as the leader of the Northern Whigs. Mr. Corwin was irretrievably injured by a course so flatly in contradiction of his previous action. He lost the support and largely forfeited the confidence of the Ohio Whigs, who in 1848 had looked upon him as a possible if not probable candidate for the Presidency.