were earnest and active. Stevens was then a member of the House
and had waged bitter war against the measures. Wade and Fessenden
had not yet entered the Senate, but were powerful leaders in their
respective States. These men had not given up the creed which
demanded an anti-slavery restriction on every inch of soil owned
by the United States. They viewed with abhorrence the legislation
which had placed freedom and slavery on the same plane in the
Territories of Utah and New Mexico. They believed that Texas had
been paid for a baseless claim ten millions of dollars, one-half
of which, as a sharp critic declared, was hush-money, the other
half blood-money. They regarded the cruel law for the return of
fugitive slaves as an abomination in the sight of God and man. In
their judgment it violated every principle of right. It allowed
the personal liberty of a man to be peremptorily decided by a United-
States commissioner, acting with absolute power and without appeal.
For a claim exceeding twenty dollars in value, every citizen has
the right to a trial by jury; but by this law the body, the life,
the very soul of a man, possibly a free-born citizen, might be
consigned to perpetual enslavement on the fallible judgment of a
single official. An apparently slight, yet especially odious
feature of the law which served in large degree to render it
inoperative was that the United-States commissioner, in the event
of his remanding the alleged fugitive to slavery, received a fee
of ten dollars, and, if he adjudged him to be free, received only
five dollars.

It soon became evident that with the Whigs divided and the Democrats
compactly united upon the finality of the Compromise, the latter
would have the advantage in the ensuing Presidential election.
The tendency would naturally be to consolidate the slave-holding
States in support of the Democratic candidates, because that party
had a large, well-organized force throughout the North cherishing
the same principles, co-operating for the same candidates, and
controlling many, if not a majority, of the free States. The
Southern Whigs, equally earnest with the Democrats for the Compromise,
were constantly injured at home by the outspoken anti-slavery
principles of leading Northern Whigs. Just at that point of time
and from the cause indicated began the formation of parties divided
on the geographical line between North and South. But this result
was as yet only foreshadow