There were also two complaints of arrogant aggression from the opposing sides. At the North there was complaint that the "slave power," as it was called, sought and threatened to make itself dominant and supreme in the Union by its demands for the rendition of fugitive slaves. At the South there was complaint that the homes and firesides of the Southern people were menaced with servile insurrection by the activities of those who sought to breed discontent among the negroes and spread among them sentiments dangerous to public peace and order. There was complaint at the North that the constitutional and statutory provisions for the rendition of fugitive slaves exacted of Northern people an obligation which many of them could not conscientiously fulfil, making them unwilling parties to a system which their consciences abhorred, or, if they refused obedience, condemning them to the condition of lawbreakers and denouncing them as criminals because of their refusal to do that against which their very souls revolted. On the other hand the people of the South complained that their Northern brethren, or many of them, not only assisted runaway slaves to escape but deliberately incited them to that course and that the constitutional compact upon that subject was not enforced by any adequate statutory law.
On both sides discontent was rampant and threatening. On both sides dissatisfaction had begun to look to the dissolution of the Republic as the readiest remedy available.
There were statesmen like Senator Benton who laughed to scorn the idea that any considerable part of the people could ever seriously contemplate an assault upon the integrity of the Federal Union, but that the Union was truly and very gravely in danger subsequent events conclusively demonstrated.
It was to save the Union from disruption at the hands of Northern or Southern fanatics—all of whom were threatening that disaster—that Clay framed, Webster supported, Congress adopted, and the President approved the compromise measures of 1850.
Those measures covered substantially all the points in controversy. The bills were five in number.
The first provided for the separation of New Mexico from Texas, with compensation to Texas, and for the admission of that territory to the Union as a state when it should become populous enough, with or without slavery as its own people should at such time determine.
The second set off Utah from California and provided in a precisely similar manner for its ultimate admission to the Union as a state.
Neither of these two measures ever resulted in anything practical. Even unto this day New Mexico has remained too sparsely populated for statehood and Utah was not admitted to the Union until long after the Constitution of the United States had been so amended as to prohibit slavery in any part of the Republic.
The third of Clay's compromise bills provided for the admission of California to the Union as a state under the Constitution which it had adopted, which made no provision for the existence of slavery within its borders.
The fourth of the bills was a new and more strenuous fugitive slave law than any that had ever before existed. It was intended to carry out the provision of the Constitution of the United States on that subject and it was supposed to be offset to Northern sentiment by the fifth of the compromise measures which forbade the slave trade within the strictly national domain of the District of Columbia.
It had long been a grievance to Northern minds that this peculiarly national territory, governed as it was exclusively by a Congress representative of all the states in the Senate and of all their people in the House, and wholly without any expression of the will of its inhabitants, was made a slave mart, into which the slave-trader from Maryland or Virginia could take his chattels for sale on the auction block to other slave-traders who were there to buy speculatively that they might sell again to the owners of cotton and rice fields at the South.
In the North and South there had always been a radical distinction in men's minds and consciences, between slavery and the slave-trade; between the holding of men in hereditary bondage under a system essentially patriarchal and kindly, and the deliberate traffic in human beings for purposes of speculative profit.
There were two distinct questions with respect to slavery in the District of Columbia. To have abolished the institution there root and branch, as multitudes of petitioners prayed, would have been to menace the two states, Virginia and Maryland, which had given the District to the Union.1 It would have been to establish within their borders and by national authority a little Canada into which fugitive slaves from either of those states might escape with the certainty of thereby achieving freedom; for in the temper of that time no fugitive slave law could by any possibility have been enforced there after once Congress had decreed the abolition of slavery within the District.
1 Virginia's portion had been receded to that State in 1846.
But the abolition of the slave-trade within this peculiarly national domain was quite another matter. It left to all Southerners summoned thither on one or other sort of governmental business, or removing thither to reside, the right freely to bring then domestic servants with them without fear of molestation; but it made an end of that traffic in negroes as mere merchandise which was even more offensive to the better people of the South than to those of the North—which was socially as severely frowned upon in the one part of the country as in the other and concern with which made the slave-trader as completely a social outcast in Virginia as it might have done in Massachusetts.
Mr. Clay's five bills were framed and introduced in pursuit of his dominant purpose to preserve the American Union at whatever sacrifice of principle or of interest, and in like spirit they were enacted by both houses of Congress. They had the strong support of Daniel Webster in one of the ablest orations he ever delivered in behalf of the Union; a speech made, as Webster's biographers contend, in full knowledge of the fact that its delivery must cost him his very last hope of election to the presidency; a speech which brought upon him the odious accusation of having "sold out to the slave power."2 They had the support also of men on both sides of the danger line of cleavage who strongly disapproved of some of them but who voted for all in the firm conviction that together they constituted a compromise necessary to the preservation of the Union.
2 Unhappily for his reputation Mr. Webster gave color to this charge by accepting a large sum of money from Mr. Corcoran as a scarcely disguised reward for the speech.
That object was still supreme in the minds of the great majority, North and South alike. It was felt on both sides—in spite of personal convictions, personal interests, and the irritating friction of political agitation—that after all, the cause of human liberty, human progress, and the system of self-government among men was dependent upon the perpetuity of the union of these states. It was felt that the enslavement of the negro, now that the Constitution, the statute law, and the public sentiment of the country had robbed it of its most repugnant feature—the African slave-trade—was a matter of minor consequence in comparison with the perpetuity of the only government on God's earth which had ever rested its right to be upon the twin theories of unalienable rights and the consent of the governed.
To the two disunion parties, the one aggressively active at the North in behalf of abolition and the other equally aggressive at the South in behalf of slavery, these compromise measures were intensely offensive. But to the great majority of the American people their passage seemed