tartled the city from its slumbers, and
convinced the Silver-Grays that the Woolly Heads still held the
capitol."--H.B. Stanton, _Random Recollections_, p. 172.]

In the meantime, other serious troubles confronted the young speaker.
The Assembly, pursuant to the recommendation of Governor Hunt, passed
an act authorising a loan of nine million dollars for the immediate
enlargement of the Erie canal. Its constitutionality, seriously
doubted, was approved by Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, and the
Whigs, needing an issue for the campaign, forced the bill ahead until
eleven Democratic senators broke a quorum by resigning their seats.
The Whigs were scarcely less excited than the Democrats. Such a
secession had never occurred before. Former legislators held the
opinion that they were elected to represent and maintain the interests
of their constituents--not to withdraw for the sake of indulging some
petulant or romantic impulse because they could not have their own
way. Two opposition senators had the good sense to take this view and
remain at their post. Governor Hunt immediately called an extra
session, and, in the campaign to fill the vacancies, six of the eleven
seceders were beaten. Thus reinforced in the Senate, the Whig policy
became the law; and, although, the Court of Appeals, in the following
May, held the act unconstitutional, both parties got the benefit of
the issue in the campaign of 1851.

In this contest the Whigs followed the lead of the Democrats in
avoiding the slavery question. The fugitive slave law was absorbing
public attention. The "Jerry rescue" had not occurred in Syracuse; nor
had the killing of a slave-holder in a negro uprising on the border of
an adjoining State advertised the danger of enforcing the law; yet
the Act had not worked as smoothly as Fillmore's friends wished. It
took ten days of litigation at a cost of more than the fugitive's
value to reclaim a slave in New York City. Trustworthy estimates fixed
the number of runaways in the free States at fifteen thousand, and a
southern United States senator bitterly complained that only four or
five had been recaptured since the law's enactment. Enough had been
done, however, to inflame the people into a passion. Ralph Waldo
Emerson declared the Act "a law which every one of you will break on
the earliest occasion--a law which no man can obey, or abet the
obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of
gentleman."[405] Se