Quincy Adams and found the office irksome. He knew full well that his
true arena was the Senate Chamber,--which also was most favorable to his
presidential aspirations. But Webster was induced to take the office
declined by Clay, having for his associates in the cabinet such able men
as Ewing, Badger, Bell, Crittenden, and Granger.

Mr. Clay had lost no time, when Congress assembled in December, 1840, in
offering a resolution for the repeal of the sub-treasury act; but as the
Democrats had still a majority in the Senate the resolution failed.
When the next Congress assembled, General Harrison having lived only one
month after his inauguration and the Vice-president, John Tyler, having
succeeded him, the sub-treasury act was repealed; but the President
refused to give his signature to the bill for the re-charter of the
United States Bank, to the dismay of the Whigs, and the deep
disappointment of Clay, who at once severed his alliance with Tyler, and
became his bitter opponent, carrying with him the cabinet, which
resigned, with the exception of Webster, who was engaged in important
negotiations in reference to the northeastern boundary. The new cabinet
was made up of Tyler's personal friends, who had been Jackson Democrats,
and the fruits of the great Whig victory were therefore in a measure
lost. The Democratic party gradually regained its ascendency, which it
retained with a brief interval till the election of Abraham Lincoln.

A question greater than banks and tariffs, if moral questions are
greater than material ones, now began again to be discussed in Congress,
ending only in civil war. This was the slavery question. I have already
spoken of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which Mr. Clay has the chief
credit of effecting, but the time now came for him to meet the question
on other grounds. The abolitionists, through the constant growth of the
antislavery sentiment throughout the North, had become a power, and
demanded that slavery should be abolished in the District of Columbia.

And here again I feel it best to defer what I have to say on antislavery
agitation to the next lecture, especially as Clay was mixed up in it
only by his attempt to pour oil on the troubled waters. He himself was a
Southerner, and was not supposed to take a leading part in the conflict,
although opposed to slavery on philanthropic grounds. Without being an
abolitionist, he dreaded the extension of the slave-power; yet as he
wished to be