ter still enjoyed much more of the
confidence of the people of the country, North and South, than the
President. Nor was Webster less popular because he had been ignored by
the Administration. He was in his place in the Senate. Calhoun was also
there. It was an exceedingly able Congress, that to which Taylor and
Seward must look for support. With scant courtesy to the President, Clay
took the lead in the Senate late in January and offered his plan of
compromising the sectional quarrel. He would make a free State of
California, allow Utah, as Deseret came to be called, and New Mexico to
form Territorial Governments without mention of slavery, pay Texas ten
million dollars for her claims against New Mexico, abolish the slave
trade in the District of Columbia, and enact a Fugitive Slave Law which
would satisfy the border Southern States.

Excitement was too intense for the two parties in the Senate and House
to accept immediately this comprehensive plan. The President opposed it;
the extreme men of the South opposed it. But Clay had not lost his power
to charm, and he was still a good manager, according to the polite
phraseology of the day. He quietly secured the support of Thomas
Ritchie, editor of the Democratic organ at Washington, _The Union_; he
broke the hold of Calhoun on Mississippi by winning to his side Senator
Henry S. Foote, a fiery Democrat and foremost advocate of Southern
resistance; and within the next three months most of the Southern Whigs
who were preparing to take part in the Nashville convention indicated
their change of heart. Clay's method, almost exactly parallel to that by
which Jackson had defeated Calhoun in 1833, was to steal away the hearts
of Whigs and Westerners, to whom the Union was still sacred, and leave
the radical South isolated. And in support of his compromise the old
statesman made most moving appeals during February and March. It was the
greatest moment of his life, he thought, and in this his colleagues were
fully agreed.

But Calhoun and the ardent representatives of the lower South, supported
by nearly all of the spokesmen of Virginia and North Carolina, were the
obstacles in the way of a settlement. They demanded a slave State in
California and free access, under the protection of the Union, to all
the new Mexican territory. The extension of the Missouri Compromise line
to the Pacific would have satisfied them. Or failing in this, Calhoun
asked for an amendment to the Federal C