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He whose eloquence had secured in name the great Northwest to freedom, and who had so long been dreaded by the slave-power, had laid his crown in the dust; had counseled the people of the North to conquer their prejudices against catching slaves, and by his vote would open every sanctuary to the bloodhound.
But the wounds were immedicable, as events were soon to prove. Besides, two at least of the remedies failed to operate as emollients. They irritated and inflamed the national ulcers and provoked fresh paroxysms of the disease. The admission of California as a free State was a sort of perpetual memento mori to the slave-power.
Our oppressors will not want us to go there. They will move heaven and earth to prevent us they will talk about us getting our rights, and offer us a territory here, and all that. It is of no use. They have pressed us to the last retreat the die is cast the Rubicon must be crossed go we will, in defiance of all the slave-power in the Union.
But lo! the slave-holder wanted free trade. So Northern abolitionists helped to destroy the tariff policy, and thus to expand the demand for, and the culture of, cotton. Now, see, the gold of California has perpetuated free trade by enabling our merchants to meet the enormous demand for specie created by free trade. So California helps the slave-power.
Thereupon the Southern excitement increased all the faster. The slave-power was not disposed to accept anything short of complete submission on the part of the North. And this the North could not well yield. While the slave-holding States were clamoring for the suppression of Abolitionism in the free States, Abolitionism was giving evidences of extraordinary expansion, and activity.
A leading Southern senator boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves on Bunker Hill; and for a while the political successes of the slave-power were such as to suggest to New England that this was no impossible event.
The division of interest was becoming plain; the forces of good sense and the principles of liberty were consolidating the North against farther extension of the slave-power. The perils foreseen by Calhoun, which he had striven to avoid by repression of all political discussion of slavery, were nigh at hand.
He recognized at once that, if it was not against the slave, it was for the slave; apprehended clearly that, in so far as the new party, which, by the way, was only the second stage in the development of the central idea of his old enemy, Liberty party, as the then future Republican party was to be its third and final expression, apprehended clearly I say that, in so far as the new party resisted the aggressions and pretensions of the slave-power, it was fighting for Abolition was an ally of Abolitionism.
About the same time he began to make his assaults on the personal representatives of the slave-power in Congress, cauterizing in the first instance three Northern "dough-faces," who had voted against some resolutions, looking to the abolition of the slave-trade and slavery itself in the District of Columbia.
On the other hand, the advocates of the extension of the Slave-Power by the expansion of Slave-territory, were ever on the alert, they considered it of the last importance to maintain the balance of power between the Slave States and the Free States.
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