| The President urging action on the bill. |
The bills were dragging along slowly in both Houses, when, on May 29th, the President sent a special message to Congress urging immediate action on the subject. This gave some impetus to the proceedings in both Houses.
| Mr. Hale's amendment. Mr. Davis' amendment. |
On May 21st, Mr. Hale, of New Hampshire, moved to amend the Senate bill by a provision excluding slavery, and insisted upon the power and the duty of Congress to settle the question of slavery in the Territories, and to settle it in the interest of freedom. The debate in the Senate upon Mr. Hale's motion was long and acrimonious, during which the Southerners advanced to more and more radical ground, until Mr. Calhoun and his disciple, Mr. Jefferson Davis, expressed the same constitutional doctrine upon the subject of the extension of slavery to the Territories as Mr. Rhett had done, which was, in brief, that neither Congress nor the inhabitants of a Territory had any constitutional power to abolish slavery in, or exclude it from, a Territory. On June 23rd, Mr. Davis moved to amend the Oregon bill by the provision that nothing in the bill should be so construed as to authorize the prohibition of domestic slavery in said Territory while it remained in the condition of a Territory. The direct contradiction between the two amendments expressed, at last, the difference of attitude now assumed between the North and the South upon the question of the extension of slavery.
| The party platforms of 1848. |
It cannot be said, however, that it represented the difference of attitude of the two great parties upon the subject. The National conventions of these parties for the nominations of candidates for the presidency had just been held. The convention of the Democratic party had refused to insert the declaration in its platform that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in the Territories, in spite of the fact that the candidate nominated by it, General Cass, had acknowledged a leaning to something akin to that view, some five months previous, in a letter to Mr. Nicholson, of Tennessee, which was probably intended for circulation in the South. The exact wording of Mr. Cass' letter does not warrant us in representing him as holding to anything more, at that time, than that it was sound policy for Congress to leave the matter of the admission of slavery to, or its exclusion from, the Territories to the people of the Territories themselves. It was hardly time for Northern men to take the view of Congressional impotence in the matter held by Messrs. Rhett, Calhoun, and Davis.
On the other hand, the convention of the Whig party had refused to make the principle of the Wilmot proviso a plank in its platform, in fact had dodged the whole question of principles by adopting no platform at all, and by nominating a military man, with no political record at all, for its candidate, the old hero of Buena Vista, General Taylor.
The contradiction of view upon the question of the extension of slavery to the Territories was, thus, not one between the parties, but one between the sections. The parties were yet to be transformed by the differences between the sections. That this was to be the outcome no far-seeing eye ought then to have failed to perceive.