The legislation of 1850 must be regarded as one of the most memorable events in our constitutional and political history. It received the aid and sanction of some of the ablest and wisest statesmen the nation has ever known.—There were men in the Senate taking part in the controversy that resulted in the compromise, whose political lives had commenced when the fathers of the Republic were ruling its affairs. Clay, Benton, Webster and Calhoun were there, and the South and the North alike were represented by their ablest men. It had become their high duty to settle by an enduring principle the future policy of the nation as to the organization of territorial government for the national domain, and as to the admission of new States. The antagonisms of the North and South, fostered on the one hand by the spirit of abolition, and on the other by the spirit of slavery extension; and still more fostered by the long continued and unconstitutional attempts of Congress to deal with the question, by splitting the difference between the contending sections, could no longer be reconciled by a boundary line. With every fresh acquisition of national territory, the zeal of the contending power overleaped the congressional boundary, and demanded more for its own sectional policy.
In the Congress of 1850 the Northern or Free soil party insisted on the absolute prohibition of slavery in all the new territory acquired from Mexico. They were able as they had been before when Mr. Douglas proposed, and the South voted for it, to vote down the project of extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. The South with such Northern men as were opposed to the Wilmot proviso, were able to defeat that. Neither the Missouri Compromise nor the Wilmot proviso could be carried.—The "irrepressible conflict," long encouraged by selfish political schemers or over-zealous, if not fanatical theorists, had reached a crisis, and the nation looked on in fear.
Then it was that the great and patriotic men who carried the compromise of 1850, said to the South and to the North, we will henceforth make no line over the national domain to mark out the boundary between Free States and Slave States. Before the law of the Constitution, both Free States and Slave States are equal. The territory of which we are the trustees belongs neither to Northern institutions, nor to Southern institutions. We will not interfere, for we have no right to interfere, to give it exclusively to either. It is now free territory by the Mexican law. We will not extend slavery over it, nor will we exclude slavery from it; but we open the territory to citizens of all the States alike. It is their common property. The land is all before them where to choose; let them go in with their wives and their children, their men servants and their maid servants, their goods and their cattle, and the stranger that is within their gates, and form such domestic institutions as may suit their wants and desires, consistent with republican government and the Federal Constitution, which is for them, as for us, the supreme law. Let the people, who are to constitute States in all that wide domain, decide for themselves, for they will best know, what fundamental or temporary laws they want, and the Federal government will protect them in their free choice. When they come to us matured, as California now is, into republican States, we will admit them to our common Union on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatsoever, "with or without slavery, as their Constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission."
Here at last was found the true solution of the question of slavery in its relations to the Federal government, and it was adopted by the Congress and accepted by the nation; for both the Democratic and Whig parties, then the great dividing political parties, united upon it as common ground in the presidential canvass of 1852. One party, however, styling itself the Free Soil Democracy, the remnant of the party that had in 1848 supported Martin Van Buren for the presidency upon the Buffalo platform of "no more Slave States—no more Slave Territory," did meet in convention, at Pittsburgh, on 11th August, 1852, to denounce in no measured language the compromise of 1850 and slavery in general. I notice this party now only to refer you at your leisure to its platform, and to ask you to note that the President of the Convention was Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, and its nominees for President and Vice-President were John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and George W. Julian of Indiana. Two of these gentlemen are now Republican Senators in Congress, and the third, Mr. Julian, a member elect from Indiana to the House of Representatives in Congress. These gentlemen were known in 1852 as Free Soil Abolitionists, in 1860 they are known by the more fashionable and pleasant-sounding name of Republicans.
The principle of non-intervention, on which the compromise of 1850 was based, was in itself so simple, so just, so consistent with the Constitution and the democratic theory of our institutions, that it could not but prevail. Out of 3,143,679 votes cast for President in 1852, Mr. Hale received 155,825, leaving 2,987,854 as the popular vote in favor of the compromise of 1850.
I rejoice to know that in that great struggle to establish sound and enduring constitutional principle, to rule the Federal government on the question of slavery, the Whig party and its noble old leaders, were as they had ever been, on the side of the Union and the Constitution. The compromise of 1850 was with Webster and Clay the crowning achievement of illustrious lives, and having accomplished this great work, they soon—
"Sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust,
Drew around them the drapery of the couch of death,
And laid down to pleasant dreams,"
full of years and full of honors.
The compromise of 1850 touched the true principle of dealing with slavery, but it was not a perfect work. It left upon the statute book of the nation, legislation still operating over United States territory, directly opposed to the principle of non-intervention, which the nation had almost unanimously approved. The principle of the compromise of 1850, and the principle of permission or prohibition involved in a geographical line to divide Free and Slave States, were directly inconsistent with each other, and sooner or later this inconsistency had to be met and removed. For the Congress to say, as they did in the compromise of 1850, that the people of Texas, Utah and New Mexico, should be admitted to the Union as Free States or as Slave States, as they might choose, and at the same time to affirm as they did by retaining, or at least not formally erasing, the Missouri compromise line and the Oregon prohibition, that the people of Kansas, Nebraska and Oregon, and all the north-west territories should come into the Union as Free States or not at all, was a glaring inconsistency, and discrimination, not in favor of the North, but in favor of the South. Men in Oregon wanting domestic slaves could not have them. Men in Utah and New Mexico wanting slaves could have them or not, as they pleased. One man in the nation was found able enough, and brave enough, and patriotic enough to grapple with this question and bring it to the test, and carry out to its logical results the doctrine of the compromise of 1850; and that he bore himself bravely and well through the trying ordeal, and against fearful odds, even his bitterest foes must admit.
Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, was but 37 years of age when he stood in the United States Senate, one of the ablest of the supporters of the compromise of 1850. His own hand had drawn the bills to admit California as a Free State, and to organize Utah and New Mexico. Among the venerable princes of the Senate, he was their equal, and Henry Clay, the noblest Roman of them all, moved by Mr. Douglas' magnanimity on that occasion, pronounced him to be "the most generous man living."