n event, the
significance of which was not taken into account by the political
conventions or by Clay, which was to test the conscience of the nation.
This was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Was this only an "event,"
the advent of a new force in politics; was the book merely an abolition
pamphlet, or was it a novel, one of the few great masterpieces of
fiction that the world has produced? After the lapse of forty-four
years and the disappearance of African slavery on this continent, it is
perhaps possible to consider this question dispassionately.

The compromise of 1850 satisfied neither the North nor the South. The
admission of California as a free State was regarded by Calhoun as fatal
to the balance between the free and the slave States, and thereafter a
fierce agitation sprang up for the recovery of this loss of balance, and
ultimately for Southern preponderance, which resulted in the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska war, and the civil war.
The fugitive slave law was hateful to the North not only because it was
cruel and degrading, but because it was seen to be a move formed for
nationalizing slavery. It was unsatisfactory to the South because it
was deemed inadequate in its provisions, and because the South did not
believe the North would execute it in good faith. So unstable did the
compromise seem that in less than a year after the passage of all its
measures, Henry Clay and forty-four Senators and Representatives united
in a manifesto declaring that they would support no man for office who
was not known to be opposed to any disturbance of the settlements of
the compromise. When, in February, 1851, the recaptured fugitive slave,
Burns, was rescued from the United States officers in Boston, Clay urged
the investment of the President with extraordinary power to enforce the
law.

Henry Clay was a patriot, a typical American. The republic and its
preservation were the passions of his life. Like Lincoln, who was
born in the State of his adoption, he was willing to make almost any
sacrifice for the maintenance of the Union. He had no sympathy with the
system of slavery. There is no doubt that he would have been happy in
the belief that it was in the way of gradual and peaceful extinction.
With him, it was always the Union before state rights and before
slavery. Unlike Lincoln, he had not the clear vision to see that the
republic could not endure half slave and half free. He believed that