extension of slavery to keep the new
territory free soil. Efforts were at once made to prevent this. At a
meeting of Southern members of Congress, an address written by Calhoun
was adopted and signed, and published all over the country. It

1. Complained of the difficulty of capturing slaves when they escaped to
the free states.

2. Complained of the constant agitation of the slavery question by the
abolitionists.

3. And demanded that the territories should be open to slavery.

A little later, in 1849, the legislature of Virginia adopted resolutions
setting forth:

1. That "the attempt to enforce the Wilmot Proviso" would rouse the
people of Virginia to "determined resistance at all hazards and to the
last extremity."

2. That the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia
would be a direct attack on the institutions of the Southern States.

The Missouri legislature protested against the principle of the Wilmot
Proviso, and instructed her senators and representatives to vote with
the slaveholding states. The Tennessee Democratic State Central
Committee, in an address, declared that the encroachments of their
Northern brethren had reached a point where forbearance ceased to be a
virtue. At a dinner to Senator Butler, in South Carolina, one of the
toasts was "A Southern Confederacy."

%376. State of Feeling in the North.%--Feeling in the free states ran
quite as high.

1. The legislatures of every one of them, except Iowa,[1] resolved that
Congress had power and was in duty bound to prohibit slavery in the
territories.

[Footnote 1: Iowa had been admitted December 28, 1846.]

2. Many of them bade their congressmen do everything possible to abolish
slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

The struggle thus coming to an issue in the summer of 1849 was
precipitated by a most unlooked-for discovery in California, which led
the people of that region to take matters into their own hands.

%377. Discovery of Gold in California.%--One day in the month of
January, 1848, while a man named Marshall was constructing a mill race
in the valley of the American River in California, for a Swiss immigrant
named Sutter, he saw particles of some yellow substance shining in the
mud. Picking up a few, he examined them, and thinking they might be
gold, he gathered some more and set off for Sutter's Fort, where the
city of Sacramento now stands.

[Illustration: %Sutter's mill%]

As soon as he