Except for the radicals, the people of all parties and sections were in a mood, whatever their specific political creed, which did not preclude the possibility of compromise. Until the actual dawn of Secession, the history of the slavery question in America is a history of compromises between the effort of the slave states to extend their influence into new territory, and the gradually awakening moral opposition of the free states. Contributing to the tendency to compromise was a strong feeling that the slavery question was not a proper political issue. The greater parties were accordingly slow to formulate a definite policy respecting it. Until the formation of the Republican party in 1856, both of the great parties of the country, the Whigs and the Democrats, drew support from Northern and Southern states alike. The Whigs, Northern and Southern, and the Democrats, Southern and Northern, differed within their own ranks upon the Fugitive Slave Law, upon the extension of slavery to the territories, upon its suppression in the District of Columbia, and upon other questions of policy respecting slavery; but they tried to keep these differences, however intense, out of their party platforms, and, so long as it remained possible, deprecated the division of national parties upon sectional lines. The Liberty party in the North, the party of the Abolitionists, did, it is true, from 1840 to 1850 antagonize slavery in the main plank of its platform, just as the Prohibition party to-day antagonizes liquor selling; but the party

drew small electoral support and exerted only a moral influence. Not until after 1854 did the slavery question dominate all party platforms.

In 1848, the year when the Whigs elected General Taylor to the presidency, the slavery issue had advanced to a new and threatening aspect. Political power in Congress stood evenly poised between fifteen slave and fifteen free states. Slavery and the slave trade prevailed in the District of Columbia. An obsolete law compelling the return of fugitive slaves who escaped intree territory encumbered the statute books. By the terms of the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820, in all of the territory of the Louisiana Purchase lying north of latitude 36° 30', slavery had been forever forbidden, except in the Territory of Missouri, then promised admission to the Union, and formally admitted in 1821 with a state constitution which forbade the legislature to make any restrictions upon slavery. In the territory south of 36° 30′, slavery was permitted. This Act of Congress, though capable of repeal like any other act, had been enacted with such assurance by all parties that it was to be a permanent settlement of the whole controversy over slavery, and had so long stood the test of time, that it seemed to have the stability and authority of an article of the Constitution. All these features of the situation as it existed in 1848 seemed not inconsistent with continued quiet. But the fruits of the Mexican warthe territory out of which California, New Mexico,

and Utah were afterward formed-had been ceded by Mexico in a treaty signed in the February preceding General Taylor's election. The Southern element in Congress, already accused of plotting to secure the admission of Texas and of fomenting the Mexican war as a means of adding new slave territory to the United States, now manifested a definite design to open this territory to slavery. But no legislation had been so far enacted. The Wilmot Proviso, introduced in Congress in 1846 by David lmot of Pennsylvania, proposing to prohibit slavery in all territory to be acquired from Mexico, after uniting Northern sentiment against slavery as it had never been united before, had failed to pass after arousing extraordinary debate.

The disposition of this new territory in the Southwest, respecting slavery, was the nucleus of a growing and ominous unrest. In 1850 California, of her own motion, applied for admission to the Union with a state constitution prohibiting slavery. Since 1792-3 Congress had followed the general policy of admitting states to the Union in pairs, one slave and one free, so as to preserve the balance of power between the slave and the free states. But to pair with California no slave territory stood ready for statehood. The South opposed the admission of California except upon the principle of compensation. Thus was constituted a complex problem of many aspects: the South wished to open the territories of New Mexico and Utah to

slavery; she desired the enactment of a more efficient law for the recovery of fugitive slaves; from some quarters of the South came the demand that Texas be divided into four states, according to a privilege reserved by the national government when Texas was admitted to the Union. Texas herself presented for settlement certain monetary claims and a troublesome boundary dispute with New Mexico. From the North, on the other hand, came demands for the prohibition of the interstate slave trade; for the suppression of both slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and for the passage of the Wilmot Proviso.

After a long struggle out of the flux of contending interests emerged at last, under the leadership of Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas, the great Compromise of 1850. By the terms of this agreement California was admitted as a free state; the remainder of the area ceded by Mexico was formed into territories with no restriction as to slavery; a new law for the recovery of fugitive slaves was enacted; Texas received $10,000,000 in lieu of all her claims, including those in the boundary dispute with New Mexico; and the slave trade, but not slavery, was prohibited in the District of Columbia. No mention in the final settlement was made of the interstate slave trade, or of the proposition to divide Texas into four states. The debates in Congress upon these measures furnish much of the most splendid oratory in our legislative history. In the galaxy of speakers were

Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Cass, Benton-veteran leaders all-and the bold and youthful Douglas. All of them save Calhoun believed, or hoped, that now an ultimate settlement of the problem of slavery was reached. When Douglas returned from Washington to his home in Illinois it was with the declaration that he never expected to address Congress again upon any aspect of the slavery problem.

Douglas's share in the legislation of 1850 made him a national leader of the Democratic party. Born in Vermont in 1813, and emigrating first to New York and afterward to Illinois, he had made himself leader of the Jacksonian Democracy in his neighborhood before he was twenty-one years of age. Great personal magnetism, extraordinary energy of character and strength of intellect, and remarkable skill in debate, joined to a comprehensive knowledge of the political history of his country, prognosticated a rise in political station, almost unexampled in its swiftness and its audacity. By his discomfiture of a local orator of some repute, Douglas, who, though somewhat less than five feet in stature,1 possessed a great voice, a deep chest and a massive head, gained with his first political address the nickname of "The Little Giant," an epithet which clung to him throughout his career. Beginning as district-attorney, he was next elected to the state legislature in 1836, where 'Henry Villard, in his Memoirs (Vol. i. p. 55), says that Douglas was "not over four and a half feet high."