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WEBSTER ON THE COMPROMISE.

439

sistency, and thus help undermine their cause. As the Wilmot proviso would recognize slavery south of the compromise line, its supporters might be accused of giving their votes in favor of perpetuating slavery.

Webster had always opposed expansion, but Texas had been joined to the Union by Democratic votes, and there remained only one honorable course, to carry out the purchase and contracts created with it at the time of its admission. These called for slave States; but the law which sanctioned slavery in Texas did not apply to California and New Mexico, that, said he, "is the law of nature, of physical geography, of the formation of the earth" settling forever "with a strength beyond all dream of human enactment that slavery cannot exist in California or New Mexico." But by slavery he did not mean the institution as it existed at the South. The law of nature did not prevent penal servitude. The peonism familiar to Mexican law, a form of servitude which lingered longest in the United States.1 Webster had a strange idea of the California country. In his imagination it seemed strongly to have resembled the wildly mountainous regions of Asia. By no possibility, said he, could anybody be induced to go into New Mexico with slaves. California was in much the same condition. Thus, the two regions were destined to be free "by the arrangement of things ordained by the power above us." And he declared that in the territorial bill for New Mexico before the Senate he would not vote to insert any prohibition whatever on slavery; he would "not take pains uselessly to reform an ordinance of nature, nor to re-enact the will of God, and would put in no Wilmot proviso for the mere purpose of a taint of a reproach." Thus far Webster's defense of

1 For an account of its abolition in Texas and New Mexico, see Vol. III.

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WEBSTER ON THE COMPROMISE.

contrary, where slavery prevailed, and there were thousands of religious men with consciences as tender as any of their brethren at the North, the institution was not considered unlawful. Taking up the prevailing objections to slavery, he attempted to answer all of them, and he dwelt at length upon the pro-slavery compromises of the Constitution. The intention of the Fathers, he said, was to leave slavery where they found it, entirely under the control of the States themselves, and with this understanding the Constitution had been adopted. It was the States which had agreed to the ordinance of 1787. The several acquisitions of territory down to the annexation of Texas had successively changed the aspect of the slavery question, but the most important change had been effected by the admission of Texas. From the moment of its annexation the whole country to the western boundary of Texas was pledged forever to be slave property. In Webster's opinion there was not within the United States or any of its territories a single foot of land, the character of which in so far as being free or slave soil, was not fixed by some irrevocable law beyond the power of the general government.

By the terms of its admission, the vast domain of Texas might be subdivided into four slave States, for it lay South of the Missouri Compromise line; and Texas had been obtained, said he, "for the security of the slave interest of the South;" a statement to which Calhoun promptly demurred. After the acquisition of New Mexico and California, many Northern Democrats had voted to extend the Wilmot proviso over them and had returned to their constituents to make political capital out of their conduct, crying free soil and no slavery. In thus attacking the free soilers it was Webster's purpose to create a doubt in the public mind, of their integrity and con

WEBSTER ON THE COMPROMISE.

439

sistency, and thus help undermine their cause. As the Wilmot proviso would recognize slavery south of the compromise line, its supporters might be accused of giving their votes in favor of perpetuating slavery.

Webster had always opposed expansion, but Texas had been joined to the Union by Democratic votes, and there remained only one honorable course, to carry out the purchase and contracts created with it at the time of its admission. These called for slave States; but the law which sanctioned slavery in Texas did not apply to California and New Mexico, that, said he, "is the law of nature, of physical geography, of the formation of the earth" settling forever "with a strength beyond all dream of human enactment that slavery cannot exist in California or New Mexico." But by slavery he did not mean the institution as it existed at the South. The law of nature did not prevent penal servitude. The peonism familiar to Mexican law, a form of servitude which lingered longest in the United States.1 Webster had a strange idea of the California country. In his imagination it seemed strongly to have resembled the wildly mountainous regions of Asia. By By no possibility, said he, could anybody be induced to go into New Mexico with slaves. California was in much the same condition. Thus, the two regions were destined to be free "by the arrangement of things ordained by the power above us." And he declared that in the territorial bill for New Mexico before the Senate he would not vote to insert any prohibition whatever on slavery; he would "not take pains uselessly to reform an ordinance of nature, nor to re-enact the will of God, and would put in no Wilmot proviso for the mere purpose of a taint of a reproach." Thus far Webster's defense of

1 For an account of its abolition in Texas and New Mexico, see Vol. III.

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WEBSTER'S CONCLUSIONS.

the Constitution and the Union was practically a defense of slavery.

He then took up the grievances of the South against the North, and they had been cited by Calhoun and in each instance found the North guilty. For its personal liberty laws, its anti-slavery agitation, its violation in the spirit of the compromise respecting slavery, he could make no defense. But there were complaints of the North against the South of which the principal was the arrest of free persons of color as fugitive slaves. Offenses, he said, irritating, exceedingly unjustifiable and oppressive; but he did not examine the grievances of the North as he did those of the South nor blame the South as he did the North. His apology was chiefly for slavery.

Unlike Calhoun, he found in Clay's resolutions a compromise of peace for the country. Unless some compromise was made disunion seemed impending, and secession, peaceable secession, said Webster, would be an utter impossibility. As in his reply to Hayne nearly twenty years before he closed with an eloquent appeal for liberty, the Constitution and the preservation of the Union. But the defender of the Constitution had become the defender of slavery.

On the day before Webster's speech, the Mississippi legislature passed a joint resolution which plainly indicated the state of public sentiment at the South. California and other regions acquired from Mexico should be given territorial government by Congress, and all citizens of the United States residing in them, or removing to them, should be protected in their civil and political rights. The failure of Congress to provide laws for the government of California and to protect equally all citizens of the United States removing to it with their property, so ran these resolutions, was in the highest de

A SOUTHERN CONVENTION URGED.

441

gree unjust toward the people of the slave-holding States, because it deterred them from going to California with their slaves, and was intended to deprive them of an equal share of the property of the Union. The course which Congress had pursued in refusing to provide a territorial government for California had been manifestly for the purpose of promoting the objects of the abolitionists. To admit California into the Union as a sovereign State with a free soil constitution would be a fraud on the right of the slave-holding States. The legislature, therefore, instructed the Senators and Representatives of the State to resist the admission of California by all constitutional means.1 Other resolutions from other Southern legislatures emphasized State sovereignty, denied the power of Congress to legislate as to slavery, attacked the principle of the Wilmot proviso and supported the doctrines which Calhoun had so often and so effectively laid down. There was a general movement at the South for a convention of the slave-holding States to consider the question of defending Southern rights, and Calhoun was secretly urging for one to assemble at Nashville, early in June. Clay's opening speech for the compromise; Webster's apology for slavery and Calhoun's philippics against the compromise each had a backward look. The new Democracy found an advocate in William H. Seward, of New York, who, on the eleventh of March, delivered an epoch-making speech against the compromise.2

Seward looked to the future; Webster, Clay and Calhoun, were children when the Constitution was adopted. They grew up under the shadow of the Fathers and advo

1 Mississippi Resolutions on California, March 5, 1850; on Federal Relations, March 6, 1850, in the State Laws.

2 It is indexed "Remarks on California, the Union and Freedom;" in the Appendix of the Congressional Globe, Vol. XXII, Part 1, First Session, Thirty-first Congress, 26-269.

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