the consummation of violence-all that check its extension or abate its strength, tend to its extirpation." And for the vindiIcation of his vote in favor of free soil, he looked "not to the passing hour, disturbed as the public mind then was by conflicting interests and passions, but to that period when the vast regions over which they were then legislating should have received their destined inhabitants." 83

The nature and consequences of the attempt to placate the South by sacrificing the principle of the Wilmot Proviso were more impressively defined by Salmon P. Chase, at the end of a long, elaborate, and argumentative speech which occupied two days, March 26 and 27, 1850:

It may be, however, that you will succeed here in sacrificing the claims of freedom by some settlement carried through the forms of legislation. But the people will unsettle your settlement. It may be that you will determine that the territories shall not be secured by law against the ingress of slavery. The people will reverse your determination. It may be that you will succeed in burying the Ordinance of Freedom. But the people will write upon its tomb, Resurgam (I shall rise again); and the same history which records its resurrection may also inform posterity that they who fancied they had killed the Proviso, only committed political suicide.34

33 Cong. Globe, Thirty-first Congress, 1st session, Appendix, pp. 260 et seq. 34 Cong. Globe, Thirty-first Congress, 1st session, Appendix, p. 480.

CHAPTER XXIII

PASSAGE OF THE COMPROMISE BILLS

On the 18th of April, 1850, Clay's resolutions were referred to a select committee of thirteen senators, together with a series of resolutions submitted by John Bell, of Tennessee, and all the petitions and memorials on slavery and allied questions that had been laid before the Senate since the beginning of the session. Many efforts were made to exclude one or other of the issues from the deliberations of the committee, or to instruct its members against combining two or more of those issues in a single bill. Hannibal Hamlin especially tried hard to keep the California Bill out of the combination, and to reserve it for consideration by itself; but all such attempts failed, and the committee was left to deal with the several controversies comprehensively, and without instructions.

The chairman of the historic Committee of Thirteen was, of course, the prime mover of the compromise proposals, Henry Clay. The other members, being the twelve who received the largest numbers of votes in a general ballot, were Lewis Cass, of Michigan; Daniel S. Dickinson, of New York; Jesse D. Bright, of Indiana; Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts; Samuel S. Phelps, of Vermont; James Cooper, of Pennsylvania; William R. King, of Alabama; James M. Mason, of Virginia; Willie P. Mangum, of North Carolina; Solomon W. Downs, of Louisiana; John Bell, of Tennessee; and John M. Berrien, of Georgia.1 Seven (including the chairman) represented slaveholding States, and three at least of the northern members (Cass, Dickinson and Webster) were vigorously anti-Proviso.

The agreement to refer had been reached only after nearly

1 Cong. Globe, Thirty-first Congress, Ist session, p. 780.

three months of debate, ending with a scene of violent disorder between Thomas H. Benton, of Missouri, and Henry S. Foote, of Mississippi, in which the Mississippian drew a pistol and the disputants were with difficulty separated by other senators; but after the transference of the argument from the floor of the Senate to the committee room, proceedings must have moved more smoothly, for an agreement was arrived at and a report submitted in less than three weeks-on May 8, 1850. This is, however, less surprising in view of the large majority by which the committee were of one mind (the mind to say no) on the most controversial of all the questions-the question of admitting the principle of the Wilmot Proviso.

2

The report was a long document, of more than ten thousand words; but as its authors suggested, its views and recommendations could be recapitulated in a few sentences. own recapitulation is quoted below, with a few supplementary

notes.

Their

"1. The admission of any new State or States formed out of Texas to be postponed until they shall hereafter present themselves to be received into the Union, when it will be the duty of Congress thoroughly and faithfully to execute the compact with Texas by admitting such new State or States." The body of the report urged, further, that these prospective States should be admitted without any objection on account of exclusion or permission of slavery, as their inhabitants might elect.

"2. The admission forthwith of California into the Union with the boundaries which she has proposed." The Committee expressed belief that there were irregularities in her application, but thought that under the circumstances they should be overlooked.

"3. The establishment of territorial governments without the Wilmot Proviso for New Mexico and Utah, embracing all the territory recently acquired by the United States from Mexico not contained in the boundaries of California." The Committee adopted the theory that the Wilmot Proviso, as related to these territories, was a "mere abstraction."

2 Cong. Globe, p. 944, et seq.

"4. The combination of these two last-mentioned measures in the same bill."

"5. The establishment of the western and northern boundary of Texas, and the exclusion from her jurisdiction of all New Mexico, with the grant to Texas of a pecuniary equivalent; and the section for that purpose to be incorporated in the bill admitting California and establishing territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico." The pecuniary equivalent was conjecturally estimated at six to ten million dollars.

"6. More effectual enactments of law to secure the prompt delivery of persons bound to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, who escape into another State." It was proposed by the Committee, however, that a master going into another State to reclaim a fugitive should first establish the fact of escape and file a description of his property, attested by competent record, for presentation to the arresting officer; and that a slave declaring his freedom should have trial on return to the State from which he was said to have escaped.

"7. Abstaining from abolishing slavery; but under heavy penalty, prohibiting the slave trade in the District of Columbia."

With their report the committee submitted three bills: the first dealing with the admission of California, the establishment of territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah, and the settlement of the boundary of Texas; the second, with the Fugitive-Slave Law; and the third, with the termination of the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

The first of these-an act in thirty-nine sections-derisively known as the "Omnibus Bill," ran absolutely counter to an instruction which Benton had tried unsuccessfully to intro. duce; an instruction representing the mind of many of the senators, that several subjects should not be linked together in one legislative act. The result, as summarized by Carl Schurz, was that:

There were those who would vote for the admission of California, but not for the territorial governments without the exclusion of slavery; there were those who would vote for the terri

torial governments but not for the Texan boundary; and those who would not vote for the admission of California in any combination. In other words, it appeared probable that, while each of the different propositions might receive a majority of votes, the different majorities would be composed of different sets of men, and the combined measure would receive no majority at all, on account of the opposition of different men to different parts of it. The antislavery men insisted upon the admission of California and territorial governments with the Wilmot Proviso. The extreme proslavery men . . . not only would not accept the admission of California, but demanded positive recognition of the right of slaveholders to take their slave property into the territories.3

For ten weeks, in the heat of a Washington summer, the compromise bill occupied the larger part of the time of the Senate, and Clay's closing speech was not made until July 22the same day on which Daniel Webster laid before his colleagues a copy of his letter to the governor of Massachusetts, resigning his seat in the Senate to accept the Secretaryship of State of the United States. Two days later-on the same day on which the voting on the compromise bill began in the Senate, Wilmot made, in the House, his July 24 speech on the California question in which, once more-and for almost the last time on that floor-he used all his power of expression and argument to urge slavery restriction as the only peaceful road to slavery extinction.*

Six months had passed since Clay's compromise resolutions had been submitted to the Senate or the separate California Bill to the House. Two months had elapsed since the Committee of Thirteen had submitted their report, and agreement still seemed remote. Clay had not been hopeful from the beginning. As early as May 31, he had written to his son,

Thomas:

3 Carl Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, Vol. II, pp. 348, 349.

4 See Appendix, "Speech on the California Question."