practical operations and the general impression concerning their
intentions seem to indicate, the real object of those who directed the
movement was the exclusion from public trust of persons professing the
Catholic religion, then, of course, it was an object which could not be
avowed without bringing them into open conflict with the Constitution,
which expressly forbade such differentiation on religious grounds.

Between the jealousy of new immigrants felt by the descendants of the
original colonists and the religious antagonism of Puritan New England
to the Catholic population growing up within its borders; intensified by
the absence of any genuine issue of debate between the official
candidates, the Know-Nothings secured at the Congressional Election of
1854 a quite startling measure of success. But such success had no
promise of permanence. The movement lived long enough to deal a
death-blow to the Whig Party, already practically annihilated by the
Presidential Election of 1852, wherein the Democrats, benefiting by the
division and confusion of their enemies, easily returned their
candidate, Franklin Pierce.

It is now necessary to return to the Compromise of 1850, hailed at the
time as a final settlement of the sectional quarrel and accepted as such
in the platforms of both the regular political parties. That Compromise
was made by one generation. It was to be administered by another. Henry
Clay, as has already been noted, lived long enough to enjoy his triumph,
not long enough to outlive it. Before a year was out the grave had
closed over Webster. Calhoun had already passed away, bequeathing to
posterity his last hopeless protest against the triumph of all that he
most feared. Congress was full of new faces. In the Senate among the
rising men was Seward of New York, a Northern Whig, whose speech in
opposition to the Fugitive Slave clause in Clay's Compromise had given
him the leadership of the growing Anti-Slavery opinion of the North. He
was soon to be joined by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, null in
judgment, a pedant without clearness of thought or vision, but gifted
with a copious command of all the rhetoric of sectional hate. The place
of Calhoun in the leadership of the South had been more and more assumed
by a soldier who had been forced to change his profession by reason of
a crippling wound received at Monterey. Thenceforward he had achieved an
increasing repute in politics, an excellent orator, with th