e
answered with a soldier's oath that if anyone really attempted to carry
it out, they should be dealt with by law as they deserved, and executed.
Clay's language was no less explicit. When Senator Rhett in Charleston
proposed to raise the flag of secession, and his colleague, Barnwell in
the Senate, half indorsed his words, Clay said, with a lightning flash
that thrilled the audience, that if Senator Rhett followed up that
declaration by overt acts "he will be a traitor, and I hope he will meet
the fate of a traitor!" Clay went on to say that if Kentucky should ever
unfurl the banner of resistance unjustly against the Union, "never,
never will I engage with her in such a cause!"

There was in Congress a new element, of the smallest in numbers, but
with the promise and potency of a great future. Four days after Webster,
Seward spoke in the Senate. He advocated the admission of California as
a free State, with no additions or compromises. No equilibrium between
freedom and slavery was possible; if established to-day it would be
destroyed to-morrow. The moral sentiment of the age would never permit
the enforcement of a law requiring Northern freemen to return slaves to
bondage. The entire public domain was by the Constitution devoted to
union, justice, defense, welfare, and liberty; and it was devoted to the
same noble ends by "a higher law than the Constitution." The extension
of slavery ought to be barred by all legal means. Threats of disunion
had no terrors for him. The question was "whether the Union shall stand,
and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and
political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort and with
compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war
ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation."

Salmon P. Chase of Ohio spoke to similar effect. If, he said, the claims
of freedom are sacrificed here by forms of legislation, "the people will
unsettle your settlement." "It may be that you will succeed in burying
the ordinance of freedom. But the people will write upon its tomb, 'I
shall rise again.'"

The disunionists found that they had little popular support behind them.
A convention at Nashville, held to promote the interests of the South,
refused to countenance any extreme measures. General Taylor steadily
favored the admission of California as a free State, with no
qualifications or accompaniments. Then, while the result in Cong