Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/308

270 ceding that the question was of the great importance insisted on not two years later and made the basis of a vast political organization scarcely a half decade later, it must appear as singular that it should be so much ignored in this campaign. The suddenness with which this question leaped in several instances into fierce agitation and as suddenly subsided, and the fact that in every instance the excitement arose when a possible advantage in political and commercial power might be gained by the southward side of the Union, betrays the insanity of the agitation and its want of moral and patriotic principle.

The &quot;public policy&quot; outlined by Taylor, the President elect from the South, in the beginning of the administration, March, 1849, indicated the national conservative spirit. In his cabinet were such Southerners as Reverdy Johnson, John M. Clayton, George W. Crawford and William Ballard Preston. Nothing in the general political canvass of 1848 had indicated any certain early dangerous uprising of the old sectional dispute. A great stretch of new territory, spreading from the Gulf of Mexico northward to an undefined boundary and westward to the Pacific ocean, lay open to occupancy, subject to the operation of the Constitution and the laws regulating the creation of territorial and State governments. Sectional political ascendency might be sought and determined by the set tlements effected within this common property by the Union, but if fairly done there could be no complaint. Even if the line of 36° 30’ with its prohibitory principle should be extended to the Pacific ocean, as Southern congressmen had voted for, there would still remain a great territory that could be included within the old Southern section. Above that line the South then proposed to make no effort to introduce the labor of slaves. Below that line which had been agreed on in the Missouri Compromise, the Southern States thought they had, under a compact, the conceded right to employ slave labor until newly formed States should decide upon its