already known to be anti-slavery, be promptly admitted to the Union.
He also suggested that New Mexico, already better protected in
property, life, liberty, and religion than she had ever been before,
be quietly left under her existing military government until she
should form a State constitution, and apply for admission,--an
event deemed probable in the very near future. That accomplished,
as he added in a special message a few days later, the claims of
Texas to a portion of New Mexico could be judicially determined,
which could not be done while New Mexico remained a territory,
organized or unorganized. These recommendations were intensely
distasteful to the South, and grew to be correspondingly popular
in the North. The sectional feeling rapidly developed and the
agitation in Congress communicated itself to the entire country.

THE UNITED STATES SENATE IN 1850.

The character and eminence of the men who took part in the discussion
gave it an intense, almost dramatic interest. Mr. Clay in his
seventy-third year was again in the Senate by the unanimous vote
of the Kentucky Legislature, in the belief that his patriotic
influence was needed in the impending crisis. Webster and Cass,
natives of the same New-England State, Benton and Calhoun, natives
of the Carolinas, all born the same year and now approaching
threescore and ten, represented in their own persons almost every
phase of the impending contest. Stephen A. Douglas had entered
the preceding Congress at the early age of thirty-four, and the
ardent young Irish soldier, James Shields, was now his colleague.
Jefferson Davis had come from Mississippi with the brilliant record
of his achievements in the Mexican war, already ambitious to succeed
Mr. Calhoun as the leader of the extreme South, but foiled in his
Disunion schemes by his eloquent but erratic colleague, Henry S.
Foote. William H. Seward of New York was for the first time taking
position under the National Government, at the age of forty-nine,
and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, five years younger, was beginning his
political career as the colleague of Thomas Corwin. John Bell was
still honorably serving Tennessee, and John McPherson Berrien was
still honoring Georgia by his service. The amiable and excellent
William R. King, who had entered the Senate when Alabama was admitted
in 1819, and who was Colonel Benton's senior in service by two
years when he resigned