13, under the fresh impression made by the great demonstration of Northern anti-slavery sentiment at Buffalo, a bill was passed in effect excluding slavery from Oregon.

Both parties during the presidential campaign denounced the Free Soilers with extreme bitterness as renegades and traitors. A new moral power, which exposes and puts to shame current insincerities, is always treated with contumely by those whose consciences are uneasy. The Whigs, who derived the greatest benefit from the Buffalo movement, seemed to be even more incensed at it than the Democrats, probably because their canvass was the more insincere. The Southern Whigs pictured General Taylor as a better pro-slavery man than Cass, while the Northern Whigs pretended that their candidate was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso. Such a trick may succeed, as it did succeed in 1848; but a party which constantly needs such tricks to achieve success, or to maintain its existence, cannot last. The Whigs carried the presidential election. General Taylor had the electoral votes of fifteen states, among which were eight of the South. But it was the last triumph of the Whig party. As soon as the slavery question became the absorbing issue, the Whig party could not remain together if the Southern Whigs were for and the Northern Whigs against slavery. The next presidential election left it a mere wreck, and a few years more buried even its name.

The Free Soil party, too, as organized at Buffalo,

was short-lived. It did not carry any state, but received nearly three hundred thousand votes. In New York Van Buren had more votes than Cass. The Democratic faction opposed to him suffered a disastrous overthrow. That accomplished, a large number of the Van Buren Democrats, and among them some of their leading men, renewed their allegiance to their old party, looking upon the revolt of 1848 as a mere political episode. Many of the Whigs, who had voted for Van Buren to avenge Clay, also returned to the fold. But, while the coalition fell to pieces, the vital principle of the Free Soil movement survived, to be obscured by a temporary reaction, and then to rise up again in final triumph.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850.

WHEN during the presidential campaign Clay entreated his friends to leave him undisturbed in his retirement, he meant undoubtedly what he said. But after a short rest his interest in public affairs naturally revived to new activity.

The strife about slavery growing constantly more embittered and threatening, some thinking men in the South, who in the general excitement had kept their temper, asked themselves whether slavery was really the economical, moral, and political blessing its hot-blooded devotees represented it to be; and here and there, mainly in the border Slave States, voices in favor of emancipation began to be heard again, some in mere whispers, some in more courageous utterance. Especially in Kentucky, where in the spring of 1849 a convention to revise the state constitution was to be elected, the subject became the theme of public discussion. It was the same cause which fifty years before had called forth young Henry Clay's first efforts; and now the old statesman of seventy-two lifted up his voice for it once more. In January, 1849, he went to New Orleans, and from there he sent a letter on emancipa

tion, addressed to Richard Pindell of Lexington, but intended for the people of Kentucky. That part of the letter which exposed the absurdity of the reasons usually brought forward to justify slavery might well have come from the pen of a life-long abolitionist. If slavery were really a blessing, he reasoned, "the principle on which it is maintained would require that one portion of the white race should be reduced to bondage to serve another portion of the same race, when black subjects of slavery could not be obtained; and that in Africa, where they may entertain as great a preference for their color as we do for ours, they would be justified in reducing the white race to slavery in order to secure the blessings which that state is said to diffuse." In the same style he punctured the argument that the superiority of the white race over the black justified the enslavement of the inferior. "It would prove entirely too much," said he. "It would prove that any white nation which had made greater advances in civilization, knowledge, and wisdom than another white nation would have the right to reduce the latter to a state of bondage. Nay, further, if the principle be applicable to races and nations, what is to prevent its being applied to individuals? And then the wisest man in the world would have a right to make slaves of all the rest of mankind." There was in this something of Benjamin Franklin's manner of pointing an argument. Clay had evidently written it with zest.

He deeply lamented that emancipation had not

been accomplished before, and hoped it might not long be delayed. In his opinion, emancipation should be gradual. He proposed that all slave children born after 1855 or 1860 should be free when reaching the age of twenty-five years, then to be hired out under the authority of the state for a period of not exceeding three years, in order to earn a sum sufficient to pay the expenses of their transportation to Liberia, and to provide them an outfit for six months after their arrival there. Their offspring were to be free from their birth, but to be apprenticed until the age of twenty-one, and also to go to Liberia.

This, surely, was a very slow process; and his favorite scheme of transportation to Liberia, based upon his firm belief that the two races could not possibly live together in a state of freedom, could hardly bear examination in point of practicability as well as of justice. The advanced anti-slavery men of the time criticised the plan with great severity. But the principal merit of the letter lay in the fact that Clay, as a slave-holder, and as the foremost citizen of a Slave State, proposed a plan of emancipation in any form, accompanying it with such radical reasoning on the general subject of slavery; and that merit was great. As to the practical effect of the plan, had it been adopted, Clay was certainly not wrong in suggesting that, the work once begun, a general disposition would exist to accelerate and complete it. But it was not adopted. On the contrary, the discussion served