ated thereto by the slaveholding President
Taylor himself, was likely to follow close in the Californian
foot-tracks. The admission of Texas had for a moment disturbed the
senatorial equilibrium between North and South, which, however, had
quickly been restored by the admission of Wisconsin. But the South had
nothing to offer to counterbalance California and New Mexico, which were
being suddenly filched from her confident expectation. In this emergency
those extremists in the South who offset the Abolitionists at the North
fell back upon the appalling threat of disunion, which could hardly be
regarded as an idle extravagance of the "hotspurs," since it was
substantially certain that the Senate would never admit California with
her anti-slavery Constitution; and thus a real crisis seemed at hand.
Other questions also were cast into the seething caldron. Texas, whose
boundaries were as uncertain as the ethics of politicians, set up a
claim which included nearly all New Mexico, and so would have settled
the question of slavery for that region at least. Further, the South
called for a Fugitive Slave Law sufficiently stringent to be
serviceable. Also, in encountering the Wilmot proviso, Southern
statesmen had asserted the doctrine, far-reaching and subversive of
established ideas and of enacted laws, that Congress could not
constitutionally interfere with the property-rights of citizens of the
United States in the Territories, and that slaves were property. Amid
such a confused and violent hurly-burly the perplexed body of
order-loving citizens were, with reason, seriously alarmed.

To the great relief of these people and to the equal disgust of the
extremist politicians, Henry Clay, the "great compromiser," was now
announced to appear once more in the role which all felt that he alone
could play. He came with much dramatic effect; an aged and broken man,
he emerged from the retirement in which he seemed to have sought a brief
rest before death should lay him low, and it was with an impressive air
of sadness and of earnestness that he devoted the last remnants of his
failing strength to save a country which he had served so long. His
friends feared that he might not survive even a few months to reach the
end of his patriotic task. On January 29, 1850, he laid before the
Senate his "comprehensive scheme of adjustment." But it came not as oil
upon the angry waters; every one was offended by one or another part of
it, and at on