(62) Hist. Ready Ref., vol. i, p. 350.
(63) Trist's letter to Buchanan, Secretary of State, Von Holst, vol. iii., p. 334.
(64) Historical Ex., etc., Dred Scott Case, pp. 151-9. This is the first Congress where its sessions were continued after twelve o'clock midnight, of March 3d, in the odd years. Ibid., pp. 136-9.
(65) Hist. of Mexican War (Wilcox), p. 223.
XVI COMPROMISE MEASURES—1850
The slavery agitation first began in 1832 on a false tariff issue, and precipitated upon the country in 1835, on the lines of nullification and disunion, and was again revived at the close of the Mexican War, and continued violently through 1849 and 1850. The year 1850 will be ever memorable in the history of the United States as a year wherein all the baleful seeds of disunion were sown, which grew, to ripen, a little more than ten years later, into disunion in fact. Prophetically, a leading South Carolina paper in its New Year-Day edition, said:
"When the future historian shall address himself to the task of portraying the rise, progress, and decline of the American union, the year 1850 will arrest his attention, as denoting and presenting the first marshalling and arraying of those hostile forces and opposing elements which resulted in dissolution."
At the close of Polk's administration an inflammatory address, drawn and signed by Calhoun and forty-one other members of Congress from the slave States, was issued, filled with unfounded charges against the North, professing to be a warning to the South that a purpose existed to abolish slavery and bring on a conflict between the white and black races, and to San Domingoize the South, which could only be avoided, the address states:
"By fleeing the homes of ourselves and ancestors, and by abandoning our country to our slaves, to become the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery, and wretchedness."
This manifesto did not go quite to the extent of declaring for a dissolution of the Union, but it appealed to the South to become united, saying, if the North did not yield to its demands, the South would be the assailed, and