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Clay had won. The President, resisting to the last and following the counsels of Seward, saw the majority of Congress yield slowly to influences which favored compromise. Calhoun died early in April, and though his followers maintained their position resolutely, their Whig allies were deserting them, and the Nashville convention proved a fiasco when it assembled in June. President Taylor died on the 9th of July, and the last obstacle to the success of Clay and Webster was removed. Millard Fillmore, the Vice-President, a close friend of Clay, became President; the Cabinet was reorganized, Webster becoming Secretary of State. One by one during the month of August all the features of the “Omnibus Bill” became law. The great majority of the Southerners indicated their ready acceptance of the compromise as a “finality”; and radicals like Jefferson Davis, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William L. Yancey retired from public life, either voluntarily or by compulsion of the people. The big cities of the East and the Northwest celebrated the passage of the crisis with the firing of cannon, and everywhere the thanks of the people were expressed to the “great Congress” which had saved them from civil war.

If the logic of events ever pointed to one individual as the proper leader of the people or the fit man for the Presidency, it pointed to Daniel Webster in 1852. The Whigs had not all voted for the compromise, but their leaders had been its authors. The party was entitled to claim the glory for a great performance; and if they claimed it and nominated their candidate upon a platform of “henceforth there shall be peace between the sections,” they would undoubtedly win and control the Federal Government for at least two or three presidential terms.

But with a most remarkable aptitude for blundering, the Whigs in their convention of 1852 hesitated in their pronouncement upon the compromise, and refused to nominate Webster. The radical element procured the nomination of General Winfield Scott, a Southern man of anti-slavery proclivities, and Scott blundered through the campaign, losing votes every time he made a public statement. Heart-broken, the “Godlike Webster” died before the day of election. Nor was Clay spared to witness the crushing defeat which awaited his beloved party in November. The Whig newspapers of that autumn appeared in mourning too frequently for the public mind not to be affected.

Conservative interests turned to the Democratic party, whose leaders promptly declared in their convention that the compromise was a finality. They nominated a popular but colorless young New Englander, Franklin Pierce, a colonel under Scott in the war with Mexico, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the campaign biography. Pierce said little during the months of electioneering. His rôle and that of his party was now one of conciliation. If elected he would enforce the laws and maintain the Union. Every State but four, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, gave him their electoral votes. The support of the Free-Soil Democrats, 156,000 votes and all in the abolitionist sections, showed that the country was tired of agitation. The prolonged quarrel of the sections seemed definitely closed, and the future promised peace and prosperity.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A. B. Hart's Slavery and Abolition (1906), in American Nation series; F. J. and W. P. Garrison's William Lloyd Garrison: the Story of his Life Told by his Children (1885-89), and both McMaster and Schouler in their histories, already mentioned, give all the essential facts about the abolitionists and the Wilmot Proviso struggle. James Ford Rhodes's History of the United States (from 1850 to 1877) is a work of the greatest importance, and it gives, in vol. I, the best account of the compromise measures of 1850. The following biographies are valuable for the period: T. W. Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed (1884); William Birney, James G. Birney and his Times (1890); G. L. Austin, Life and Times of Wendell Phillips (1887); Henry Cleveland, Alexander Stephens in Public and Private (1866); W. H. Haynes, Charles Sumner (1909), in American Crises series; A. C. McLaughlin, Lewis Cass (1891), in American Statesmen series. Special for the lower South: Miss Cleo Hearon, Mississippi and the Compromise of 1850 (1914); W. G. Brown, The Lower South in American History (1902); J. W. DuBose, The Life of William L. Yancey; and A. C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (1913), named in a previous note. J. D. Richardson's Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1900), vol. v; H. V. Ames's State Documents on Federal Relations (1907); and the Congressional Globe for the 29th and 30th Congresses give the most important speeches and documents bearing on the crisis of 1850.