Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/448

 416 New Territories. California. [i860 slaves thither, they might remain Southerners and spread and confirm the social standards, the economic system, and the political ideals of their native region ; if they could not carry their slaves with them, they must become "Westerners," lose their identity, change the whole order of their lives, and be added to those national forces from which the South feared nothing less than extinction. No wonder the whole country felt that great issues were joined in the compromise legislation of 1850. It was significant, as one of the notable signs of the times, that one part of that legislation had been determined beforehand, by forces which politicians could neither divert nor control. While Congress was getting ready to organise California as a Territory it became a State. Gold was discovered in California in January, 1848, and all the region of the great discovery was suddenly peopled, as if by magic. The whole world seemed all at once to send its most aggressive spirits thither, a vast company of eager, resourceful, hard-fibred men, fit to work and to shift for themselves. In they poured by shipload and by caravan, from over the seas, around the two continents by the long way of the Cape, around the northern continent by the shorter way of the Isthmus, across the endless plain by waggon and train, out of the States, out of the frontier communities of the western Territories, out of foreign lands east and west, until California showed, before the census of 1850 could be taken, a population of more than eighty thousand souls. They could not do without government : they improvised it in some rough and suitable fashion for themselves. By the autumn of 1849 they had held a general convention, framed and adopted a State constitution prohibiting slavery (for in that quickly formed community they had no slaves and wished for none, but only asked leave to live and work for themselves under rulers of their own choosing), and demanded admission into the Union. They had been encouraged to take this course by General Taylor, the frank, straightforward soldier who was then President. General Taylor was a Southerner, but he was also a democrat, and it seemed to him both legitimate and desirable that these self-sufficing pioneers in the Californian hills should choose their own government, demand their natural rights under the Constitution, and not wait upon the politicians at Washington. And they had their own way. California was admitted at once as a State, and admitted under the constitution which its inhabitants had framed. It was a bitter disappointment to the Southern statesmen. California, with its broad and fertile valleys, its soft and kindly airs, its long area toward the south, had seemed a more likely region than any other for the extension of slavery. But these eighty thousand settlers who had rushed thither for gold had determined that question ; and the most that could be offered the South by way of compensation was, that the question of the introduction of slavery into New Mexico and Utah should not also be prejudged and settled. They also had framed State