Abraham Lincoln. Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood
by the Union. The annexation was carried out, and the question of slavery was unsettled. Then events took a surprising turn.
In the winter of 1848 gold was discovered in California. Throughout 1849 gold-seekers came pouring in from every part of the world. This miscellaneous new people, whose rough ways have been more celebrated in literature than those of any similar crowd, lived at first in considerable anarchy, but they determined without delay to set up some regular system of government. In the course of 1849 they elected a Convention to draw up a State Constitution, and to the astonishment of all the States the Convention unanimously made the prohibition of slavery part of that Constitution. There was no likelihood that, with a further influx of settlers of the same sort, this decision of California would alter. Was California to be admitted as a State with this Constitution of its own choice, which the bulk of the people of America approved?
To politicians of the school now fully developed in the South there seemed nothing outrageous in saying that it should be refused admission. To them Calhoun's argument, which regarded a citizen's slave as his chattel in the same sense as his hat or walking-stick, seemed the ripe fruit of logic. It did not shock them in the least that they were forcing the slave system on an unwilling community, for were not the Northerners prepared to force the free system? A prominent Southern Senator, talking with a Northern colleague a little later, said triumphantly: "I see how it is. You may force freedom as much as you like, but we are to beware how we force slavery," and was surprised that the Northerner cheerfully accepted this position. It is necessary to remember throughout the following years that, whatever ordinary Southerners thought in private, their whole political action was now based on the assumption that slavery, as it was, was an institution which no reasonable man could think wrong.
Zachary Taylor, unlike Harrison, the previous hero of the Whigs, survived his inauguration by sixteen months. He was no politician at all, but placed in the position of President, for which fairness and firmness were really the greatest qualifications, he was man enough to rely on his own good sense. He had come to Washington under the impression that the disputes which raged there were due to the aggressiveness of the North; a very little time there convinced him of the contrary. Slave-owner as he was, the claim of the South to force slavery on California struck him as an arrogant pretension, and so far as matters rested with him, he was simply not to be moved by it. He sent a message to Congress advising the admission of California with the constitution of its own choice. When, as we shall shortly see, the great men of the Senate thought the case demanded conciliation and a great scheme of compromise, he resolutely disagreed; he used the whole of his influence against their compromise, and it is believed with good reason that he would have put his veto as President on the chief measure in which the compromise issued. If he had lived to carry out his policy, it seems possible that there would have been an attempt to execute the threats of secession which were muttered—this time in Virginia. But it is almost certain that at that time, and with the position which he occupied, he would have been able to quell the movement at once. There is nothing to suggest that Taylor was a man of any unusual gifts of intellect, but he had what we may call character, and it was the one thing wanting in political life at the time. The greatest minds in American politics, as we shall see, viewed the occasion otherwise, but, in the light of what followed, it seems a signal and irreparable error that, when the spirit of aggression rising in the South had taken definite shape in a demand which was manifestly wrongful, it was bought off and not met with a straightforward refusal. Taylor died in the course of 1850 and Vice-President Millard Fillmore, of New York, succeeded him. Fillmore had an appearance of grave and benign wisdom which led a Frenchman to describe him as the ideal ruler of a Republic, but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet nerveless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple.
The actual issue of the crisis was that the admission of California was bought from the South by large concessions in other directions. This was the proposal of Henry Clay, who was now an old man anxious for the Union, but had been a lover of such compromises ever since he promoted the Missouri Compromise thirty years ago; but, to the savage indignation of some of his Boston admirers, Webster used the whole force of his influence and debating power in support of Clay. The chief concessions made to the South were two. In the first place Territorial Governments were set up in New Mexico and Utah (since then the home of the Mormons) without any restriction on slavery. This concession was defended in the North on the ground that it was a sham, because the physical character of those regions made successful slave plantations impossible there. But it was, of course, a surrender of the principle which had been struggled for in the Wilmot Proviso during the last four years; and the Southern leaders showed the clearness of their limited vision by valuing it just upon that ground. There had been reason for the territorial concessions to slavery in the past generation because it was established in the territories concerned; but there was no such reason now. The second concession was that of a new Federal law to ensure the return of fugitive slaves from the free States. The demand for this was partly factitious, for the States in the far South, which were not exposed to loss of slaves, were the most insistent on it, and it would appear that the Southern leaders felt it politic to force the acceptance of the measure in a form which would humiliate their opponents. There is no escape from the contention, which Lincoln especially admitted without reserve, that the enactment of an effective Act of this sort was, if demanded, due under the provisions of the Constitution; but the measure actually passed was manifestly defiant of all principles of justice. It was so framed as almost to destroy the chance which a lawfully free negro might have of proving his freedom, if arrested by the professional slave-hunters as a runaway. It was the sort of Act which a President should have vetoed as a fraud upon the Constitution. Thus over and above the objection, now plain, to any compromise, the actual compromise proposed was marked by flagrant wrong. But it was put through by the weight of Webster and Clay.
This event marks the close of a period. It was the last achievement of Webster and Clay, both of whom passed away in 1852 in the hope that they had permanently pacified the Union. Calhoun, their great contemporary, had already died in 1850, gloomily presaging and lamenting the coming danger to the Union which was so largely his own creation. For a while the cheerful view of Webster and Clay seemed better justified. There had been angry protest in the North against the Fugitive Slave Law; there was some forcible resistance to arrests of negroes; and some States passed Protection of Liberty Acts of their own to impede the Federal law in its working. But the excitement, which had flared up suddenly, died down as suddenly. In the Presidential election of 1852 Northerners generally reflected that they wanted quiet and had an instinct, curiously falsified, that the Democratic party was the more likely to give it them. The Whigs again proposed a hero, General Scott, a greater soldier than Taylor, but a vainer man, who mistakenly broke with all precedent and went upon the stump for himself. The President who was elected, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a friend of Hawthorne, might perhaps claim the palm among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon him was that he was a gentleman, but his convivial nature made the social attractiveness of Southern circles in Washington overpowering to any brain or character that he may have possessed. A new generation of political personages now came to the front. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a man of force and considerable dignity, began to take the leading part in the powerful group of Southern Senators; Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, rapidly became the foremost man of the Democratic party generally; William Seward, late Governor of New York, and Salmon Chase, a Democrat, late Governor of Ohio, had played a manful part in the Senate in opposition to Webster and Clay and their compromise. From this time on we must look on these two, joined a little later by Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, as the obvious leaders in the struggle against slavery which was shortly to be renewed, and in which Lincoln's part seemed likely to remain a humble one.
3. Lincoln in Retirement.
Whether Seward and Chase and the other opponents of the Compromise were right, as it now seems they were, or not, Lincoln was not the man who in the unlooked-for crisis of 1850 would have been likely to make an insurrectionary stand against his old party-leader Clay, and the revered constitutional authority of Webster. He had indeed little opportunity to do so in Illinois, but his one recorded speech of this period, an oration to a meeting of both parties on the death of Clay in 1852, expresses approval of the Compromise. This