shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted. To a query by Senator John Davis, of Massachusetts, as to what reason was assigned for striking out the Proviso, the senator from Alabama replied shortly that there was "no time now for giving reasons or making explanations." Mr. Davis "observed that this seemed like legislating under a high degree of steam pressure. He then proceeded to examine the details of the bill." It soon became apparent that he was talking against time, and Senator Lewis interposed anxiously with the suggestion that but twenty minutes remained. If the senator from Massachusetts wished to make a speech upon the subject, he hoped there would be no objection to the introduction of a resolution "rescinding the one by which Congress had agreed to adjourn at twelve o'clock of that day." Senator Davis, interjecting a promise "to conclude before the hour for adjournment arrived," refused to yield the floor, and imperturbably continued his address. After some time Mr. Lewis again intervened. "Does the Senator from Massachusetts yield the floor?" inquired the presiding officer. "For a question of order. Davis. Otherwise not," replied Mr. "I merely wished to state the fact," responded Senator Lewis, "that the House has adjourned." The bill was dead-appropriation and restriction killed at the same stroke by a friend of the Proviso. It is said that this was the first time in the history of the Senate when a measure was "talked to death." Several historians, following perhaps the somewhat confused and partially inaccurate account of the proceedings in Blaine's Twenty Years in Congress, have assumed that it was Senator Davis's purpose thus to kill the whole thing, for fear that the Two Million Bill would be returned to the House just before 7 Cong. Globe, p. 1220. its adjournment, with the Proviso eliminated; and that rather than see the appropriation fail, the House (time for conference lacking) would recede from its amendment and pass the unrestricted measure putting the money at the disposal of the President. Von Holst, apparently attributing the senator's course wholly to an overfondness for the sound of his own voice, says: "The unseasonable loquacity of John Davis prevented the bill of the House from coming to a vote in the Senate. . . . A senator from Massachusetts had literally talked the Wilmot Proviso to death by a most sensible speech in its favor. . . . Davis's long speech was certainly ridiculous folly, as well as a grave mistake." 8 Salmon P. Chase was more briefly indignant. In a letter to Charles Sumner, dated December 2, 1847, he wrote: "Ten political lives of ten John Davises, spent in the best direction, could not compensate for this half-hour's mischief." The Senator's own explanation, elaborated in a speech made during the second session of the Twenty-ninth Congress, puts quite a different interpretation upon the incident. He admits that he believed, from what he knew of the temper of southern senators and from remarks he heard around him, that under normal circumstances it was not probable the Senate would accept the Proviso. He declares most earnestly, however, that it was his intention, as it had been his explicit promise, to allow a vote to be taken; he had, he says, actually just determined to take his seat for that purpose when the word was received that the House had adjourned. His manifest strategy was to turn the constraint of time pressure against the Senate; to talk just so long that the only alternative left would have been to pass the bill as it was, Proviso and all, or reject it altogether; to obstruct action until any return of the bill to the House, or any conference at all with the House, was quite out of the question; and then to & Constitutional and Political History of the United States, 1846-1850, pp. 288, 289. Ann. Report Am. Hist. Assoc., 1902, Vol. II, p. 124. crowd it through in the last moments of a race against time, in the hope that the friends of territorial expansion and the urgent advocates of immediate peace would concur in the Proviso rather than vote against the restricted appropriation and so postpone its passage at least until the following session. But he did not know that there was a difference of eight minutes between the clocks in the Senate and the House, the Senate clock being the slower, and this unexpected variation upset his calculations. He overshot his mark and unintentionally defeated his own object. It was a dangerous game, and the consequences of the misplay were just those Senator Davis was trying to avoid. At the next session the Senate did strike out the Proviso, and the House, having abundant time for conference, receded from its amendment and voted the appropriation without the restriction. One can only conjecture what might have happened if the measure had been allowed to take its chances in the Senate, in August, 1846, without so much attempted finesse. Henry Wilson 10 seriously questions whether the Proviso could have passed the Senate at that time, if a vote had been allowed, though he admits that a combination of the Free-State senators with the senators from Delaware and Maryland, sufficient in number to pass the Proviso, was a "bare possibility." Polk himself believed it would not have passed. An entry in his Diary, made August 9, 1846, reads: 11 Late in the evening of Saturday, the 8th, I learned that after an exciting debate in the House, a bill passed that body but with a mischievous and foolish amendment to the effect that no territory which might be acquired by treaty from Mexico should ever be a slaveholding country. What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico it is difficult to conceive. This amendment was voted onto the Bill by the opponents of the measure, and when voted on, the original friends of the Bill voted against it, but it was passed by the Whigs and northern Democrats, who 10 History of the Rise and Fall of Slave Power, Vol. II, p. 17. 11 Vol. II, p. 75. had been opposed to making the appropriation. In this form it had gone to the Senate. Had there been time, there is but little doubt the Senate would have struck out the slavery proviso and that the House would have concurred. David Wilmot afterwards declared, in words that seem suffused with regret, that he fully believed the Proviso would have passed the Senate if a vote had been reached at that first session. Certainly during the months that intervened before it came up again, hostility toward it had been thoroughly awakened, keenly sharpened and systematically organized. Looking backward, it seems as if conditions were more favorable for its passage through both House and Senate, in August, 1846, than they ever were again until 1865, when it was adopted as the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. CHAPTER VIII ANTECEDENTS OF THE WILMOT PROVISO NEITHER the problem the Wilmot Proviso undertook to adjust nor the method to which it resorted was new. Both antedated even the Constitution. The problem was that of preventing the expansion of slavery over additional territory, as that territory was acquired or organized and brought under the government of the United States; the method was that of specific prohibition by Congress, under the doctrine that the Federal power and authority to regulate such matters existed. and continued until the territory was erected into sovereign States. But back of the similarity of situation and method, there now loomed something that differentiated this case from its predecessors. That something was the apparent and increasingly determined purpose to insist on slavery restriction, not merely in the adjustment of a special instance, but as a fixed and general principle. The issue had come up first when the confederation of the original thirteen States took up the task of organizing what was known as the Northwestern Territory—generally, the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River, which had constituted the hinterlands of the former colonies. These latter had claimed this eastern slope of the interior basin diversely and sometimes conflictingly, the claims of Virginia, particularly, covering almost the whole area. By 1784, however, all the claimant States had agreed to cede their titles to the Confederation, and Congress had indicated its readiness to complete the programme by declaring that the combined territory should be "formed into distinct republican States, which should become members of the Federal Union, and have the |