DISCUSSION ON THE COMPROMISE BILL.

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LV.

styled the Omnibus Bill It proposed the admission of CHAP California; the organization, without mention of slavery,

of the territories of New Mexico and Utah; the arrange- 1849. ment of the Texas boundary, by paying the latter ten millions of dollars; the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and the enactment of a more stringent fugitive slave law.

Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, insisted that 1850. the bill was not equal in its provisions, because the South gained nothing by the measure; and he urged that the Missouri line of compromise should be extended to the Pacific, "with the specific recognition of the right to hold slaves in the Territory below that line."

To this Clay replied, that "no earthly power could induce him to vote for a specific measure for the introduction of slavery where it had not existed, either north or south of that line." "I am unwilling," continued he,

that the posterity of the present inhabitants of California and of New Mexico should reproach us for doing just what we reproach Great Britain for doing to us.” “If the citizens of those Territories come here with Constitutions establishing slavery, I am for admitting them into the Union; but then it will be their own work and not ours, and their posterity will have to reproach them and not us."

Calhoun, now near to death, in a speech read by a friend, urged that if the Union would be preserved, it must be by an equal number of slave and free States, to maintain the number of senators equal in the Senate.

"The incurability of the evil," said Senator Benton, of Missouri, "is the greatest objection." "It is a question of races, involving consequences which go to the destruction of one or the other; this was seen fifty years ago, and the wisdom of Virginia balked at it then. It seems to be above human reason. But there is a wisdom