Guard." as they called themselves, who had organized and led the anti-slavery and liberty parties; and with these were many personal friends of Van Buren, indignant at, and determined to revenge his sacrifice by the slave power. They were determined by all means to defeat General Cass. The canvass against the old parties was conducted with a zeal, an eloquence, an ability of speech and of the pen, never surpassed. It was the romance and poetry of politics, the religion of patriotism.

John Van Buren, the son of the late President, then in the meridian of his power, canvassed most of the free states, and brought into the discussion an indignant personal feeling towards those who had "done his father to death." He possessed a fiery eloquence, a scathing wit and sarcasm, which rendered him a great popular favorite and secured for him a most brilliant national reputation. Each free state had its great popular leaders, and the people turned out in vast numbers to listen to eloquence, inspired by all the fervor and poetry of liberty, and the wrongs and cruelties of slavery. John P. Hale, Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson in New England, Benjamin F. Butler, William C. Bryant, Preston King and John A. Dix in New York, Salmon P. Chase and Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, and David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, were among the most active and ardent in the contest. Although the ticket carried no electoral vote, it received a very large popular support, especially in New England, New York, Ohio, and the Northwest, and it defeated the election of Cass. General Taylor received the support of many earnest anti-slavery whigs. Among them were William H. Seward, Horace Greeley, and he who was, by and by, to lead the anti-slavery party to victory—Abraham Lincoln.

Meanwhile the whig and democratic leaders, alarmed by the rapid growth of this new and vigorous party, undertook again to settle the slavery question by compromise. When Congress met in December, 1849, the slavery issue confronted its members. The United States had acquired

from Mexico, Upper and Lower California and New Mexico. The Wilmot proviso excluding slavery had twice passed the House of Representatives, but had been as often rejected by the Senate. The slave power had secured a cession of the territory, but the extension of slavery into it was not yet secure. Fourteen free states had adopted resolutions protesting against its extension. The slaveholders, fearing the result of a struggle in Congress, attempted to frustrate Congressional action by sending out emissaries to California to organize a slave state. After the inauguration of General Taylor, in March, 1849, Thomas Butler King, a whig, and a warm advocate of slavery, and Senator Gwynne, of Mississippi, representing the democratic party, went to California and sought to get up a state constitution which should secure and protect slavery. Slaves were already there. Mr. King declared: "We can not settle this question on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. We look to you to settle it by becoming a state."

There was then no teleno railroad to the Pacific, Few more thrilling mes

The friends of freedom on the eastern side of the continent had not much hope of success in the Constitutional Convention of California. They rather expected to be compelled to make the fight in Congress on the admission of that territory as a slave state. graph spanning the continent, and and mails were slow and tedious. sages from that distant shore were ever received than that which told that the new constitution excluded slavery. It was the prelude, heralding the death of the system. The miners and laborers of California, who had flocked there in great numbers, would not tolerate the competition of the slaveholder with his gang of slaves, and they, uniting with those who were opposed to slavery from conviction, secured by constitutional provision the exclusion of slavery, and now, with her free constitution, California presented herself at the capital for admission into the Union.

This was a surprise to the slaveholders, and they, who would have welcomed her as a slave state, now wheeled

about and refused her admission. Thus another issue was added to the grave questions growing out of slavery. After long debate, Mr. Clay, who had carried through Congress the Missouri Compromise, reported a series of measures by which he and his associates hoped to settle the slavery agitation. California was to be admitted as a free state. Territorial governments were to be established in New Mexico and Utah, without attaching to them the proviso excluding slavery. The claim of Texas to nearly ninety thousand square miles of territory north of 36o, 30′, and thus made free by the Missouri Compromise, was to be recognized, and slavery extended over it. Ten millions of dollars were to be paid to Texas for her relinquishment of New Mexico. The slave trade was to be abolished at the national capital, but a new fugitive slave law, cruel and stringent in its provisions, was to be enacted.

These measures, by a combination of the leaders of both great parties, were finally forced through Congress. Mr. Webster made them the occasion of his celebrated 7th of March speech, and now the leaders said: "There shall be no more agitation, these measures are a finality, and we will have peace," and they drew up and signed a paper declaring this, and pledging one another to oppose any man who should not so regard them. But they soon learned that the conflict between slavery and freedom was irrepressible, inevitable, and must go on until one or the other should triumph. In this Lincoln was wiser than Webster, and more sagacious than Clay, who in early life had been his great. leader.

CHAPTER VII.

THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS.

STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS. REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE. THE NEBRASKA BILL.-CONDITION OF MATTERS IN KANSAS. LINCOLN COMES FORWARD AS THE CHAMPION OF FREEDOM. SPEECHES AT SPRINGFIELD AND PEORIA.- ELECTION OF TRUMBULL TO THE UNITED STATES SENATE.

THE 33d Congress convened December 5th, 1853. The election of 1852 had resulted in the choice of Franklin Pierce as President, General Scott, the whig candidate, receiving the votes of only four states. The celebrated compromise measures of 1850, already described, were, it was claimed, endorsed by the election of Pierce, and the leaders of the slavery party boasted that the slavery question was settled, and that the abolitionists and agitators were crushed to rise no more. The territory out of which the great states of Kansas and Nebraska were to grow, was then becoming settled, and the people were asking for the organization of territorial governments. Throughout all this territory, slavery had been prohibited by the time-honored Missouri Compromise.

The great senatorial leaders, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton, had left the theatre of their renown. In the Senate there were three only, who were distinctly anti-slavery men, or "free soilers," as they were called-Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase and John P. Hale. Edward Everett occupied the seat of Webster, William H. Seward was the leader of the anti-slavery whigs, but perhaps the most prominent

figure then in the Senate was the young and ambitious member from Illinois, Stephen Arnold Douglas.

Douglas was then not quite forty years old, but had already become the idol of his party, and was then in the zenith of his popularity. He had had a brilliant career in Illinois in the House of Representatives, and since his election to the Senate in 1847, had been constantly rising in influence and power. He was especially the favorite of the young democracy, who looked upon him as certain, and at no distant day, of the presidency. He had a frank, open, cordial, familiar manner; at the same time he was bold, decided, and magnetic, possessing the qualities which made a popular leader in a degree hardly surpassed by any other man in American history.

Possessed of a retentive memory, without being a scholar and without much study, by conversation and otherwise, his mind had become well stored with practical knowledge, and he was well informed in regard to the history and politics of the country. He did not forget anything he had ever read or seen or heard, and he had the happy faculty, so useful to the politician, of always remembering faces and names. His resources were fully at his command, so that he was always ready. Although he lacked humor and wit, yet as a speaker he had few equals, either in the Senate or on the stump. He had great fluency; he seized the strong points of his case, and enforced them with much vigor. His denunciation and invective were extremely powerful.

He was chairman of the Committee on Territories, and now had the audacity to introduce, in his bill organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, a provision respecting the prohibition of slavery. The proposition started the people of the free states like the fire-bell at midnight, and opened again the question of slavery, with a violence and. bitterness never before equalled. The motives which led Douglas to introduce this measure were denounced with the greatest severity. He was accused of being bribed by the promise of the presidency to break down this barrier against