a friend of Hawthorne, might perhaps claim the palm
among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious
insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon
him was that he was a gentleman, but his convivial nature made the
social attractiveness of Southern circles in Washington overpowering to
any brain or character that he may have possessed. A new generation of
political personages now came to the front. Jefferson Davis of
Mississippi, a man of force and considerable dignity, began to take the
leading part in the powerful group of Southern Senators; Stephen
Douglas, of Illinois, rapidly became the foremost man of the Democratic
party generally; William Seward, late Governor of New York, and Salmon
Chase, a Democrat, late Governor of Ohio, had played a manful part in
the Senate in opposition to Webster and Clay and their compromise.
From this time on we must look on these two, joined a little later by
Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, as the obvious leaders in the
struggle against slavery which was shortly to be renewed, and in which
Lincoln's part seemed likely to remain a humble one.

3. _Lincoln in Retirement_.

Whether Seward and Chase and the other opponents of the Compromise were
right, as it now seems they were, or not, Lincoln was not the man who
in the unlooked-for crisis of 1850 would have been likely to make an
insurrectionary stand against his old party-leader Clay, and the
revered constitutional authority of Webster. He had indeed little
opportunity to do so in Illinois, but his one recorded speech of this
period, an oration to a meeting of both parties on the death of Clay in
1852, expresses approval of the Compromise. This speech, which is
significant of the trend of his thoughts at this time, does not lend
itself to brief extracts because it is wanting in the frankness of his
speeches before and after. A harsh reference to Abolitionists serves
to disguise the fact that the whole speech is animated by antagonism to
slavery. The occasion and the subject are used with rather
disagreeable subtlety to insinuate opposition to slavery into the minds
of a cautious audience. The speaker himself seems satisfied with the
mood of mere compromise which had governed Clay in this matter, or
rather perhaps he is twisting Clay's attitude into one of more
consistent opposition to slavery than he really showed. In any case we
can be quite sure that the moderate and subtle but intensely