ople united in what seemed to be almost the unanimous
wish of the South, that the new Southwest should be preserved for the
expansion of slavery. These meetings spread over all the lower Southern
States, and as a result, a convention was called to meet in Nashville in
June, 1850. The object of this general convention was to present to
Congress a Southern ultimatum, and in the event that this should not be
heeded, to urge the secession of the slaveholding States.

In the West the crisis did not seem so acute. But Clay, now seventy-four
years old, and cured of his ambition to be President, was sent back to
the Senate in the hope of averting the calamity of a disruption of the
Union. Thomas H. Benton, though recently defeated in a campaign for
reelection, was still in the Senate. Cass was again a member of the
Senate, and he, too, felt that the Union was about to be dissolved.
Douglas and the other younger representatives of the Northwest, who had
suffered somewhat from the legislation of 1846, ceased to nurse their
grievances against the party, and deplored the "treason" of the
abolitionists who were making all the trouble. There was undoubtedly a
crisis which Southern leaders like Davis, Stephens, Yancey, and Robert
Toombs, another able Georgian who now came into national prominence,
took pains to lay to the charge of the radical anti-slavery people of
the East; that is, to Seward and his followers, who were allowing
Garrison and Phillips and the radical abolitionists to drive them into
open opposition to the South.

When Clay came back to Washington, Taylor and his Cabinet had taken
their stand, which was to recommend the admission of California as a
free State. The Mormons in Deseret and a few Americans and Mexicans in
New Mexico had taken steps toward organizing Territories in the region
between Texas and eastern California, and they were to be made
Territories with or without slavery, as they chose. If all this were
done, the South would secede and the Administration would be in a
dilemma. Taylor was a stubborn man; he had made up his mind, and he sent
to Congress a fatherly message in which his devotion to the Union above
everything else was very evident. If the Southerners, who were then
offering Texas military assistance to make good her claim to a large
part of New Mexico, chose to resist the lawful authority of the
Administration and war came, the fault would be theirs, not his.

But Henry Clay and Daniel Webs