is now free," and had "condemned that other fanaticism, alike dangerous and unreasonable, which regards slavery as the great conservative principle of our free institutions, and seeks, through the intervention of the National Government and the National Armies, its propagation over the free soil of this continent." They then believed that the time had come "when the free-soil men of this Republic should take a decided and immovable stand upon this great question. The safety of our institutions (they then said), the hopes of freedom, our own and our country's honor, demand an inflexible adherence to the principles of the Wilmot Proviso. We say to the South, and we say to the world, we stand by it."

During the intervening six months they seem to have decided to be a little less inflexible, and not to say it to the South and the world quite so loudly.

The movers and supporters of the amendment in May were of course of the proslavery faction which engineered a more material attack later in the campaign. They had entered the point of a wedge which they planned to drive deeper.

The next move was a vociferous outcry from the same claque in protest against Wilmot's renomination, on the ground that it violated an established party usage to the effect that each county in the district, in turn, should hold the congressional nomination for two successive terms, or four years altogether, and then cede it to another county, in rotation. Bradford County had had her innings, they insisted, and Tioga was entitled to name the candidate. Much was made of the issue, in an attempt to set it up as an ancient and imperative, if unwritten, law. As a matter of fact, it had scanty precedent to support it (about one cycle in the trio of counties) and it was at best merely a sort of tentative working arrangement, adopted by certain politicians for their own convenience, without any assent, interest, or even general knowledge on the part of the voters. If any further evidence of the shadowy character of this "tradition" be needed, it may be found in the fact that after Wilmot's retirement, Galusha A. Grow, his

successor as representative from that district, was returned to Congress for six consecutive terms. He was devoted to the Homestead Bill, and while sentimentally for the Proviso, had no time nor disposition to connect himself with that question aggressively or even conspicuously. Being thus absorbed in a popular effort which did not in any way disturb the party cohesion, he heard nothing of any third-term objections. Long service in the House by able men was then, as it is now, the rule rather than the exception.

An editorial in the Bradford Reporter, for July 26, 1848, pictures the conditions as they were seen at the time by a very able observer, friendly to Wilmot and devoted to the same free-soil cause, but also a well-informed and well-balanced interpreter of the public mind in his district. The election returns in the three counties, and especially in Bradford and Susquehanna for ten years thereafter, fully confirmed Mr. Goodrich's interpretation:

The politicians attach consequences to the position he [Wilmot] might occupy, wholly personal to themselves. It is the result of their calculation for the chances in their favor; a solicitude for his success or his downfall, as the one or the other strengthens the probability of a consummation of their hopes. The people are not controlled by such selfishness. With them, the love of country rises above any other consideration, and animates with patriotic ardor all their activities. With them, every measure calculated to extend the glory of the country, and extend the bounds of freedom, is received with inspiration. . . . It is before this tribunal Mr. Wilmot stands. A duty is demanded of him by them; he will perform it, even at a great personal sacrifice, or lay down the trust they have reposed in him. That duty is, that he should preserve his integrity to them in the great movement in favor of freedom with which he has identified himself, and with which his name must go down to posterity, honored as its champion, or desecrated as its deserter.

Bradford County sent her conferees to the congressional conference instructed for Wilmot. The Susquehanna County

representatives were uninstructed, the Tioga men were instructed for a "good Tioga democrat," and when the other two counties declined to yield to them and allow them to name the candidate, they withdrew and nominated Jonah Brewster, a proslavery democrat, on a bolting ticket. A mass meeting of democrats in Tioga indorsed Brewster's candidacy, and adopted resolutions declaring their "little faith in men who profess to be democrats but will turn aside from time-honored principles embraced in the great democratic creed, and adopt in their stead a single local abstraction which can never make free territory more free."

The chairman of the committee which prepared these resolutions was James Lowrey, who appeared two years later as Wilmot's rival for the congressional post, in a campaign resulting in the withdrawal of both contestants and the substitution, and election, of Galusha A. Grow

The results of the 1848 campaign are thus briefly but sufficiently sketched by A. K. McClure: 7

Wilmot's masterly speeches aroused his constituents to most aggressive action. . . . There was a normal democratic majority of about 2,000 in the district, and the whigs, taking advantage of the democratic disturbance, nominated Henry W. Tracey, and entered the contest confident of his election; but Wilmot broke all party lines by his appeals to the people, and the result was his election by 8,597 votes, to 4,795 for Tracey, and only 922 for Brewster.

In spite of the split on his own office, he ran far ahead of the State ticket in his district, and he secured there nearly four thousand votes for Van Buren as the free-soil candidate for

the presidency of the United States. Wilmot's popularity which Plitt had been so glad to believe was "tottering" in January, certainly seemed robust enough by the first of October.

Tioga Eagle, September 14, 21, 1848. 7 Recollections of Half a Century, p. 237.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PROVISO IN THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS

ALTHOUGH David Wilmot did not himself find or take the occasion to move the Proviso anew in the Thirtieth Congress, it was nevertheless the most persistent and prolific topic of debate during the entire session.

It could not be otherwise. An unorganized Oregon had been left over from the preceding Congress, and the negotiation of the treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo, closing the Mexican War, added an unorganized New Mexico and California. Vast gateways had been opened southwest and northwest, and something must be done to establish organized government for the American civilization already in flow toward and through them.

This civilization was not homogeneous; it was dual-part slave and part free-and the two social and economic systems were conflicting and incompatible. They could not mingle; one must exclude or expel the other. But the peculiarity of the situation was that slavery acted automatically, while freedom could act only by legislation. That is, if, with ostensible impartiality, the door were left open to both, and slavery came in, free labor was ipso facto dispossessed; it would not enter, or having entered, would withdraw, as it could not persist where the slave put the stamp of degradation upon the act of toil and the status of the toiler. Preëxisting or coëxisting free industry or agriculture, however, put no such ban on the entry or continuance of slavery. The superficially fair-seeming course of admitting both, therefore, meant giving a monopoly to the slave interests, over the entire region in which their "institution" could exist; but the grant of the monopoly was invisible; whereas, if free soil were preserved by legal restriction-the only way in which it could be preserved-the South, though

the country was still open to it in every respect except that of installing slaves, denounced the visible, man-made statute as sectional, unfair, and an invasion of natural and constitutional rights.

Restrictive legislation, then, was opposed by the slave interests as an open and exclusive gift of all this territorial treasure to the North. Omission of restrictive legislation, the North declared, would be a tacit but still more exclusive delivery of the rich regions into the hands of the slaveholders. And back of the economic conflict lay a question perhaps even more important in the eyes of Congress-that of political power and its balance as influenced by the increase of free-soil or slave States (and senators) in the ultimate organization of the new regions. While some of the Administration group were eager to fight the thing out openly, others (probably the larger faction), hoped to evade it by taking some bypath. A letter from Persifor F. Smith to Franklin Pierce,1 dated February 2, runs in part as follows:

Mr. Trist has signed the treaty with the Mexican Government. .. I hope a ratified treaty may arrive before any vote is taken on the Wilmot Proviso. It would at once afford a solution of that most difficult and dangerous question. For after our acquisition by this treaty no opportunity may be offered for years to annex any territory to ours, and the reason for the Proviso will fail, and before it can arise again the question will have resolved itself. . . .

Please not to mention the treaty until it is promulgated by the Executive. There may be some reason to be silent until the Senate can vote on it.

The issue, in fact, was omnipresent, planted deep in the minds of the members and senators-perhaps by the diligent cultivation given it by all parties as a test and shibboleth pro

1Pierce papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. Smith was then military governor of Vera Cruz. Trist was one of Polk's Commissioners to Mexico.