political controversy
more distracting and more ominous than the worst it had yet experienced.

For, while calmly accepting the divers political arrangements made for
distant States and Territories, the men of the North, who had fumed and
argued against the passage of the Fugitive-Slave Law, when its
enforcement was attempted in their very presence were altogether
outraged. When the "man-hunters" chased and caught negroes in their
village market-places and city streets, when free men were summoned to
obey that law by helping to seize trembling fugitives and send them back
to worse than death, then they burst forth in a fierce storm of rage
that could not be quieted. The agitation rose and spread; lecturers
thundered; newspapers denounced; great meetings were held; politicians
trembled. And even yet the conservatism of the North was not wholly
inflamed; for political partisanship is in itself a kind of slavery, and
while the Northern Democrats stood squarely with the South, the Northern
Whigs, fearing division and defeat, made strenuous efforts to stand on
both sides, and, admitting slavery to be an "evil," to uphold the
Fugitive-Slave Law because it was a part of the "great compromise." In
Congress and out, in national conventions, and with all the power of the
party press, this view was strenuously advocated; but in 1852 the
Democrats elected Franklin Pierce as President, while the compromising
Whigs were cast out. Webster, the leader of the compromisers, had not
even secured a nomination, but General Scott was the Whig candidate;
while William H. Seward, at the head of the Antislavery Whigs, had at
least the satisfaction of seeing that, amid the dissolving elements of
the Whig party, the antislavery sentiment was gaining strength day by
day. The old issues of tariffs and internal improvements were losing
their vitality, while _Freedom_ and _Slavery_ were the new poles about
which new crystallizations were beginning to form.

But the Compromise of 1850 had loosed from its Pandora's box another
fomenter of trouble, in the idea of leaving to the people of the
Territories the settlement of whether their incoming States should be
slave or free,--the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" as it was called.
The nation had accepted that theory as a makeshift for the emergency of
that day; but slave cultivation had already exhausted much of the
Southern land, and, not content with Utah and New Mexico for their
propagandism, the sl