ved all
opponents of slavery in a common condemnation. It was wilful
misrepresentation to talk of the Free-Soilers as if they were identical
with the abolitionists, and no one knew better than Mr. Webster the
distinction between the two, one being ready to secede to get rid of
slavery, the other offering only a constitutional resistance to its
extension. His tone toward his opponents was correspondingly bitter. When
he first arrived in Boston, after his speech, and spoke to the great crowd
in front of the Revere House, he said, "I shall support no agitations
having their foundations in unreal, ghostly abstractions." Slavery had now
become "an unreal, ghostly abstraction," although it must still have
appeared to the negroes something very like a hard fact. There were men in
that crowd, too, who had not forgotten the noble words with which Mr.
Webster in 1837 had defended the character of the opponents of slavery, and
the sound of this new gospel from his lips fell strangely on their ears. So
he goes on from one union meeting to another, and in speech after speech
there is the same bitter tone which had been so foreign to him in all his
previous utterances. The supporters of the anti-slavery movement he
denounces as insane. He reiterates his opposition to slave extension, and
in the same breath argues that the Union must be preserved by giving way to
the South. The feeling is upon him that the old parties are breaking down
under the pressure of this "ghostly abstraction," this agitation which he
tries to prove to the young men of the country and to his fellow-citizens
everywhere is "wholly factitious." The Fugitive Slave Law is not in the
form which he wants, but still he defends it and supports it. The first
fruits of his policy of peace are seen in riots in Boston, and he
personally advises with a Boston lawyer who has undertaken the cases
against the fugitive slaves. It was undoubtedly his duty, as Mr. Curtis
says, to enforce and support the law as the President's adviser, but his
personal attention and interest were not required in slave cases, nor would
they have been given a year before. The Wilmot Proviso, that doctrine which
he claimed as his own in 1847, when it was a sentiment on which Whigs could
not differ, he now calls "a mere abstraction." He struggles to put slavery
aside for the tariff, but it will not down at his bidding, and he himself
cannot leave it alone. Finally he concludes this compromise campaign wit