however, at which some southern members had hinted, and which Garrison had favored in the North, there was no likelihood; "gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession."

Most of the discussion, singularly sober for a debate in which feeling and prejudice, tradition and habit, were so much involved, was of expediency, adjustment, legal or constitutional rights, equity, good faith. One clear note of moral protest was heard. Senator William H. Seward, of New York, speaking for the Free-Soilers as well as for himself, opposed all compromise, this one in particular, and insisted that no compromise would avail to stay. the agitation against slavery. The Constitution, he declared, does not recognize property in man, nor yet any such thing as an equilibrium between free States and slave. A “higher law" recognizes the national domain as a part of the common heritage of mankind, and the American people as the administrators of it in the name of the Creator.

It was not at once seen which side had gained the most by the compromise. California was a free State, and with its admission the balance between the sections in the Senate had been destroyed, never to be restored. On the other hand, the application of squatter sovereignty" to New Mexico and Utah left those Territories at liberty to become slave States if they chose; and it was clear that the decision would be, in the main, a matter of climate. The painful features of the slave-market would no longer thrust themselves before members of Congress on their way to and from the capitol building at Washington. So far the greater immediate gain appeared to accrue to the North. Two things only had the South, still

dominant in the national councils, won: a postponement of the final decision about slavery, and a dreadfully efficient fugitive-slave law. The first gave but a brief breathing space, while the second unwittingly heartened the North for war.

XXI

THE PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR

HERE were not wanting those who looked upon

THE

the compromise of 1850 as a final adjustment of the slavery controversy. Troublesome as the question had been, it had now, it was thought, been settled, and settled on principle. So long as slavery was not to be abolished as a moral evil, what better or fairer adjustment could there be than to let each new State, as it came into the Union, decide for itself whether its labor should be slave or free? So thought many. Webster went about the country defending the arrangement, albeit speaking of his opponents with a bitterness which was not his wont. Eight hundred leading men of Boston and vicinity, among them George Ticknor, Rufus Choate, William H. Prescott, and Jared Sparks, signed an address approving the doctrine of his seventh-of-March speech, and enthusiastic admirers cancelled his notes and gave him presents of money. But Webster's work was nearly done. The blow which his defence of the fugitive-slave act gave to the antislavery cause recoiled speedily upon his own head. He lived long enough to be dethroned by the New England which had looked up to him as to a god, to be repudiated by those whose political convictions he had done much to form, and to be denounced as an apostate