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Mexican war made him the national hero. Previous to his nomination for president he had had no political aspirations. He did not seek the nomination-it was urged upon him. The large acquisition of territory which the successful closing of the Mexican war had brought to the United States caused violent agitation on the question of slavery in the territories. Taylor, in the beginning of his administration, took his stand on the question of the organization of the new territory with a soldierly directness and definiteness of purpose which commands respect to the present day.

Sixteen months after his inauguration, President Taylor died, and for the second time in the history of the government, the vice-president succeeded to the presidency.

Taylor was born in Virginia in 1784 and died at his post of duty in Washington, D. C., July 9, 1850. On the following day Millard Fillmore took the oath of office in the presence of both houses of congress, and became the chief executive of the nation.

446. Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the United States, was, like his predecessor, the son of a frontier farmer. At an early age he learned the trade of a fuller. In 1823 he was admitted to the bar. He was a member of the New York house of representatives and later a Whig member of congress from New York. While in congress, Fillmore was chairman of the ways and means committee and was the author of the tariff of 1842. He was comptroller of the state of New York at the time of his election to the vice-presidency.

On assuming the presidency, July 10, 1850, he surrounded himself with an especially able cabinet, with Daniel Webster as secretary of state.

His approval of the Omnibus Bill cost Fillmore his renomination to the presidency in 1852. Although the Whig members of his cabinet had advised his signing of the bill, the northern Whigs were so bitterly opposed to the Fugitive Slave

Law that in the nominating convention not twenty northern votes could be obtained for his renomination.

Four years later, while traveling on the continent of Europe, he received the news of his nomination for the presidency by the American or Know-Nothing party. In the ensuing election he received the electoral vote of one state only-Maryland.

His later life was spent in dignified retirement at his beautiful home in Buffalo, and his name was connected with much of the charitable work of the city in which he had lived for nearly half a century. He was not a genius, but a "safe and sagacious statesman." He was born in New York in 1800 and died in Buffalo, New York, in 1874.

447. The Newly Acquired Territory and President Taylor's Policy. The advocates of slavery extension who had been counting on carving slave states out of the newly acquired territory were doomed to disappointment. Slavery had been abolished in the Mexican republic ten years before the war occurred; therefore all the territory which the United States acquired at the close of the war became a part of the public domain as free territory. Within two years after the closing of the war, California, the richest of the new possessions, applied for admission to the union, and, to the chagrin of the south, with a constitution prohibiting slavery. The southern leaders at once opposed its admission as a free state, thereby reöpening the whole slavery question.

President Taylor, a slaveholder himself, was a union man after the stamp of Andrew Jackson. He did not favor the further extension of slavery, though he believed in leaving the whole question of slavery to the choice of the inhabitants of new states themselves. Anticipating the question which would probably come before congress he had sent confidential agents to California and New Mexico suggesting to the citizens of those territories the advisability of organizing state governments so as to be ready to apply for admission as soon as congress should convene. This California had done,

and New Mexico had made some progress toward organization when congress convened in December, 1850. This policy of the president, had it been carried out by congress, would have disposed of the whole question in a simple and natural way, and was in keeping with the straightforward method of dealing with questions, so characteristic of Taylor's whole career. But to this policy the southern leaders objected, contending that the dividing line (36° 30′) between slave and free territory should be extended to the Pacific coast, or that all the new territory should be open to slavery. So bitter was the discussion that followed the application of California for admission, that it threatened to disrupt the union. Should California come in as a free state, it was more than likely that slavery would be rejected in the remainder of the new territory. The south, therefore, recognized that the whole question of the balance of power between the slave and free states was involved in the struggle, since if the south lost this territory, there would be no territory left from which to erect additional slave states.

448. Clay's Plan: The Compromise of 1850.-The struggle had not progressed far, when Senator Clay placed himself in opposition to the president's policy and sought to bring the warring factions together by compromise. In January, 1850, he introduced in the senate a series of resolutions covering many and varied subjects. The resolutions were immediately referred to a committee of thirteen, of which Clay was chairman, with instructions to report a bill covering the suggestions. The committee reported a series of compromise measures, which after long discussion were passed as separate bills. These separate compromise measures, popularly known as the Omnibus Bill, provided:

(1) That California be admitted as a free state.

(2) That the territories of Utah (including Nevada) and New Mexico (including Arizona) be organized without mention of slavery.

(3) That the boundary dispute between Texas and New

Mexico be settled in favor of New Mexico, and that the United States pay Texas $10,000,000 as indemnity.

(4) That the slave trade be forever prohibited in the District of Columbia (though slavery was not to be abolished there).

(5) That enacted.

a stringent fugitive slave law should be

449. The Debate in Congress over the Compromise was long and bitter. The struggle was indeed a battle of the giants, in which Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and William H. Seward participated.

Clay pleaded as he never did before for the preservation of the union and sought to restore harmony by his series of compromises. In this he was joined by Webster, who delivered on the 7th of March, 1850, a calm, though eloquent, speech which by its advocacy of compromise alienated friends and admirers in every section of the country. Webster's speech was received with astonishment in the free states. The north felt that it had lost its chiefest support, and the south that it had gained a convert in New England's favorite son. The great orator never regained the popularity which he lost on account of this "Seventh of March" speech, and two years later died a broken-hearted man.

John C. Calhoun, unyielding to the last, spurned both the policy of Clay and that of the president and declared that unless the north ceased its interference with slavery, the union must be dissolved. In such an event he pleaded for "peaceable secession."

It fell to the lot of William H. Seward, the newly elected senator from New York, to champion the policy of President Taylor. In an impassioned sp.ech, the eloquence of which stirred the whole senate, he condemned all compromises with slavery as being in opposition to the conscience and moral sentiment of the nation. He set himself squarely against the further extension of slavery in the territories, and asserted that all territory belonging to the government was

free, and as such was devoted to liberty and justice, not only by the constitution, but by a "higher law" than the constitution-the moral law. In reply to Calhoun's plea for "peaceable secession," Webster had declared such an event impossible, and Seward expressed unquestioned confidence in "the power of the American people to maintain their national integrity under whatever menace of danger." Before the compromise measure had passed congress, President Taylor died. It therefore fell to the lot of Millard Fillmore, his successor, to attach his signature to the measures included in the Omnibus Bill, whereupon all its provisions became law.

450. The Fugitive Slave Law provoked violent opposition in the north, where private citizens were compelled by law to assist in the arrest of fugitive slaves. In many instances, officers from the slave states would appear in a free-state community and in defiance of local authority make arrests, even going so far as to kidnap freeborn colored persons whom they unjustly reduced to slavery. The north looked upon this whole procedure as an outrage and soon sought to defeat the force of the Fugitive Slave Law by enacting Personal Liberty laws. These laws prohibited the use of state jails for the confinement of fugitives, and forbade any judge or officer to assist a slave owner in the recovery of his slave, or issue a writ looking to the arrest of a fugitive. These laws also provided that trial by jury should be granted alleged fugitives. Every free state, with the exception of New Jersey and California, opposed the returning of fugitive slaves.

451. The Underground Railroad. In 1838, the Quakers in Pennsylvania established a series of secret stations reaching from the border state of Maryland on the south, through the states of Pennsylvania and New York to Canada on the north, to assist escaping slaves to reach Canada. As soon as a slave stepped foot upon Canadian soil he became a free man under Canadian law. Slaves would be clothed and fed

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