crush him, confined to Pennsylvania." It extended its confines later, as it became more and more patent that the Proviso was not and could not be a party issue (as the parties were then constituted) but was an assertion of principle dividing the two great social and economic systems between which the country was apportioned.

By April, the Proviso was crowding the editorial pages and the news columns of the press throughout the country fuller than the tariff had filled them a year previously. It was recognized, indeed, as involving a vastly more important and more critical issue. As von Holst puts it:1

If slavery was excluded from the newly acquired territories, and in such a way as to establish, as a principle for the future, the exclusion of slavery from all territories to be acquired, the balance of the slave States in the Union was irrecoverably lost, and the beginning of the end of slavery had arrived. The Wilmot Proviso was thus a question of life and death for the slavocracy, and from their whole previous history it was clear that they would not allow it to be decided against them without war to the knife, as it was certain that the war had made impossible the postponement of the decision. The struggle had now to go on until in one way or another it led to a final decision between the opposing principles of freedom and slavery.

It was a struggle which, in the words of a contemporary writer in the Nineteenth Century, "made more noise in the land than any other since the bank question. It has been discussed in Congress, in the newspapers, on the stump, at the street corners, all over the whole country, until David Wilmot's name is now mentioned more frequently than those of the candidates for the Presidency-because it stands wedded to a great principle of legislation." Wilmot Proviso Leagues2

1 Constitutional History of the United States, Vol. III, p. 290.

2 See the Articles of Union of the Indiana David Wilmot Proviso League, dedicated "to those who love their country more than party," with the admonition that "We are sleeping upon a volcano. Let truth, therefore, go ahead, and wake the Nation before it is too late." Printed at Cincinnati, 1848.

sprang up throughout the free States, and mass meetings and conventions of opposition throughout the South. "The agitation of the Wilmot Proviso," as Salmon P. Chase described it in an autobiographical sketch,3 "instead of decreasing, increased until, in the spring of 1848, it appeared destined to be the controlling issue of the next presidential campaign. It had absorbed the deliberations of Congress, then occupied in discussing the territorial governments for Oregon and the vast regions to be acquired from Mexico. By no political casuistry, and by no party diplomacy, could it be excluded from the contest."

Polk, whose reactions to matters affecting his administration, though often querulous, were sometimes prophetic, entered in his diary, January 4, 1847, his conviction that "the slavery question is assuming a fearful and most important aspect. The movement of Mr. King to-day [that is, the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso] if persevered in, will be attended with terrible consequences to the country, and cannot fail to destroy the democratic party, if it does not threaten the Union itself." Calhoun, with even keener vision of the inevitable tendencies of the Proviso, but with a strategy which Polk later condemned as "not only unpatriotic and mischievous, but wicked," sent out his "summons to the South to make the slavery question in all its aspects and relations the polestar of its policy, and thereby to force this issue upon the North as the question upon which party lines must be drawn." 5

3 Robert B. Warden, Private Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p. 316.

4 Diary, April 6, 1847.

Von Holst, Constitutional and Political History of the United States, Vol. III, p. 317. Several of Calhoun's letters in the Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, show how he persisted in and expanded this concept. One to J. R. Mathews written from Fort Hill, June 20, 1849, commends the "noble example" of Mississippi, where "both parties have united, like true patriots, against the aggression of the North." Another, to Herschel V. Johnson, emphasizes Calhoun's hope that Virginia "will back the Mississippi move. If she should, and the other southern States should follow, I feel assured it would do more than anything else to bring the question to a speedy issue."

The reintroduction of the Wilmot Proviso in connection with the Three Million Bill, and the purpose of standing on the principle, disclosed by its sponsors in the ensuing debate, had in fact, as William Jay said, "rent asunder the transparent veil with which the proslavery party had attempted to conceal the true object of the war, and provoked the southern members into unusual frankness." And on no point was their frankness more startling to northern political leaders, solicitous above all for the retention of party and personal offices and power, than on the subject of the southern attitude toward Proviso supporters in the coming elections-especially the presidential campaign, just about to get under way.

In July, the democratic State convention of Georgia included among its resolutions "that the democratic party of Georgia will give support to no candidate for the Presidency of the United States who does not unconditionally, clearly and unequivocally, declare his opposition to the principles and provisions of the Wilmot Proviso." Alabama was to follow a little later with the differently phrased but equally significant declaration that they would support the nominees of the Democratic National Convention for President and Vice President of the United States "if they are opposed to the principles of the Wilmot Proviso." These were only the forerunners of a general unison. The legislatures of every free State except two (Wilmot announced in a later speech) passed resolutions in favor of the Proviso, "while every slave State has declared as one man against it." The most spectacular effect appeared in the national campaign.

The Presidency, in fact, was held up to the highest bidder, and the humiliating spectacle is presented to the world of an ignominious rivalship among the leading men of the North in a race of subserviency to Southern demands. . . . The three prominent aspirants in the democratic party hastened to make fair weather with the South.

• Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War, p. 185. Bradford Reporter, Sept. 12, 1847.

James Buchanan was first in the race, and he bid high indeed. In his famous, or more properly infamous, Berks County Harvest Home letter he broadly reasserted the geographical Missouri Compromise, which would give the greater and better portion of the new territory hopelessly and without restriction to the dominion. of slavery forming a belt of it from the Gulf to the Pacific, effectually stopping the southward spread of free labor.

George M. Dallas followed in his Pittsburg speech, which was an attempt to say Good Lord, Good Devil, with the same breath . . . the recommendation to leave the whole matter with the people of the territories, when organized, was a cowardly evasion of the true issue.

9

Next came the celebrated Nicholson letter of Lewis Cass, which obtained him the nomination.

The doctrine that slaveowners may carry their victims into any and every part of our now free territory was of course well received at the South. We can imagine how grimly John C.

8 This letter, issued August 5, 1847, justified the extension of the compromise line of 36° 30', with free soil north and slave soil south, by historic precedent and the "spirit of compromise," and excused it further as a sentimental concession only, of no probable practical effect, because none of the soil in question was adapted to slave labor; escape from California would be too easy for slaveholders to risk their property there, and the emigration would be from the North anyway, so no slaves would be taken. With this sop to the North, the writer turned to the South in his conclusion, offering them this sentiment: "The Missouri Compromise: Its adoption in 1820 saved the Union from threatened convulsion. Its extension in 1848 to any new territory we may acquire will secure a like happy result." A bitter denunciation of the Wilmot Proviso was published by Buchanan later in a letter to a public meeting, printed in a supplement to the North American Gazette, Nov. 22, 1850, and reprinted in James Buchanan's Works (John Bassett Moore), Vol. VIII, p. 394.

Dated at Washington, Dec. 24, 1847. Cass declared himself opposed to any such legislation by Congress as would be effected by the Proviso, and favorable to leaving the matter entirely to the people of any territory acquired, because (1), he saw no constitutional grant of the requisite legislative power to Congress; (2), any such measure would weaken the Union and sow discord; (3) it would lead to a dishonorable termination of the war; (4), it would not pass the Senate; (5), it could not operate in any State to be formed from new territory, as sovereignty lay with the people, who could execute their own will at pleasure. Further, the question was not one of increase, but of diffusion, of slavery; by opening more territory, we should not create more slaves, but spread the same numbers over a larger area, with general advantage. Finally, the territory was generally unfit for slavery, and the inhabitants could not be slaveholders in any case.

Calhoun must have smiled to see himself outdone by this prince of "doughfaces." 10

Cass was not the only one who was on his way to push Calhoun hard in his appeal to southern prejudices. The race to catch and endorse the southern point of view became keener as time went on, and before long Buchanan was ready to go quite as far as the South Carolina statesman in rallying the slave interests to a united stand against the North he was supposed himself to represent. Witness his letter to Samuel L. Gouverneur, December 31, 1849:'

I agree with you that "the times are greatly out of joint," but I do not entertain very gloomy apprehensions for the Union, although I believe it is in greater danger than it has been at any former period of our history.

To secure its safety, all that is necessary is for the South to act in such a manner as to convince the North that they are in earnest. Let them be united & firm, without being violent, & let them evince, by their conduct (which they have never yet done) that the question is above & beyond party, and all will be well. There is no man of common sense & even moderate patriotism at the North who would dream of endangering the Union for the sake of the Wilmot Proviso or the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, were the alternative fairly presented.

From the other side of the political arena the most interesting voice was that of General Zachary Taylor. From his distant post in the field he seems at first to have been disposed to dismiss the disturbing Proviso as a passing irritation. Thus in a letter written July 27, 1847,12 in camp near Monterey, and addressed to General Jefferson Davis, he expresses the conviction that:

The Wilmot Proviso is a mere bugbear & amounts to nothing. It was gotten up to produce some important effect for the moment

10 Nineteenth Century, January, 1848, "The Wilmot Proviso," pp. 651-664. 11 Buchanan Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. 12 Taylor papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.