The legislation of 1850 must be regarded as one of the most memorable
events in our constitutional and political history. It received the aid
and sanction of some of the ablest and wisest statesmen the nation has
ever known.--There were men in the Senate taking part in the controversy
that resulted in the compromise, whose political lives had commenced
when the fathers of the Republic were ruling its affairs. Clay, Benton,
Webster and Calhoun were there, and the South and the North alike were
represented by their ablest men. It had become their high duty to settle
by an enduring principle the future policy of the nation as to the
organization of territorial government for the national domain, and as
to the admission of new States. The antagonisms of the North and South,
fostered on the one hand by the spirit of abolition, and on the other by
the spirit of slavery extension; and still more fostered by the long
continued and unconstitutional attempts of Congress to deal with the
question, by splitting the difference between the contending sections,
could no longer be reconciled by a boundary line. With every fresh
acquisition of national territory, the zeal of the contending power
overleaped the congressional boundary, and demanded more for its own
sectional policy.

In the Congress of 1850 the Northern or Free soil party insisted on the
absolute prohibition of slavery in all the new territory acquired from
Mexico. They were able as they had been before when Mr. Douglas
proposed, and the South voted for it, to vote down the project of
extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. The South with
such Northern men as were opposed to the Wilmot proviso, were able to
defeat that. Neither the Missouri Compromise nor the Wilmot proviso
could be carried.--The "irrepressible conflict," long encouraged by
selfish political schemers or over-zealous, if not fanatical theorists,
had reached a crisis, and the nation looked on in fear.

Then it was that the great and patriotic men who carried the compromise
of 1850, said to the South and to the North, we will henceforth make no
line over the national domain to mark out the boundary between Free
States and Slave States. Before the law of the Constitution, both Free
States and Slave States are equal. The territory of which we are the
trustees belongs neither to Northern institutions, nor to Southern
institutions. We will not interfere, for we have no right to interfere,
to give