Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/333

Rh know you will sympathize, — the evil influence he will have on the friends of General Taylor in the two houses of Congress.” Clay's disposition, on the other hand, when he went to Washington, was not belligerent. “I shall go there,” he wrote to Stevenson, “with a determination to support any Whig measures for which I have heretofore contended, and in a state of mind and feeling to judge fairly and impartially of the measures of the administration. I shall not place myself in any leading position either to support or oppose it. But I shall rather seek to be a calm and quiet looker-on, rarely speaking, and, when I do, endeavoring to throw oil upon the troubled waters.” He did not foresee that he would at once be in a position of leadership, speaking more than ever before during any session, not at all about old Whig measures, but constantly on the one great question which the old statesman was so reluctant to recognize as the controlling question of the day.

Clay was at heart in favor of the Wilmot Proviso. In August, 1848, he explained in a letter to Stevenson how he thought the newly acquired territories ought to be treated. The retrocession of Mexico and California, which was urged by some Whigs and anti-slavery men, he did not think practicable. But, as to slavery in the territories, the South, he thought, should “yield the point in dispute.” The same idea he elaborated at length in a letter to James E. Harvey written a few days later. The North, in his opinion, was