Henry Clay, though he had come back to the
scene of his many stirring conflicts in the past minded to be "a calm
and quiet looker-on," roused himself to one more essay of that
statesmanship of compromise in which he was a master. He made a plan of
settlement that covered all the controversies and put it in the form of
a series of resolutions. It was to admit California with her free-state
constitution; to organize the remainder of the Mexican Cession into
Territories, with no restriction as to slavery; to pay Texas a sum of
money on condition that she yielded in the dispute over the boundary
between her and New Mexico; to prohibit the slave trade, but not
slavery, in the District of Columbia; to leave the interstate slave
trade alone; and to pass an effective fugitive slave law.

For two days, Clay spoke for his plan. Age, though it had not bereft him
of his consummate skill in oratory, added pathos to his genuine fervor
of patriotism as in that profound crisis of our affairs he pleaded with
his fellow senators and with his divided countrymen. There followed the
most notable series of set speeches in the history of Congress. One
after another, the old leaders, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Cass, and the
rest,--for all were still there,--rose and solemnly addressed themselves
to the state of the country and the plan of settlement. All but Calhoun:
now very near his end, he was too weak to stand or speak, and Mason, of
Virginia, read for him, while he sat gloomily silent, his last bitter
arraignment of the North. He was against the plan. Benton, though on
opposite grounds, also found fault with it. Webster, to the rage and
sorrow of his own New England, gave it his support. Then the new men
spoke. Jefferson Davis, on whom, as Calhoun was borne away to his grave,
the mantle of his leadership seemed visibly to fall, steadfastly
asserted the Southern claim that slaveholders had a right to go into any
Territory with their slaves, but offered, as the extreme concession of
the South, to extend the Missouri line to the Pacific if property in
slaves were protected below the line. Chase, of Ohio, impressive in
appearance but stiff in manner, argued weightily for the
constitutionality and rightfulness of the Wilmot Proviso. Seward, of New
York, though the shrewdest politician of the anti-slavery forces,
enraged the Southerners and startled the country with the announcement
that "a higher law than the Constitution" enjoined upon Congress