Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/350

340 now he laid great stress upon the right of Texas to form out of its territory four new Slave States. He had claimed the Wilmot Proviso as his thunder; now he opposed its application to Utah and New Mexico, because he thought slavery was excluded from them by the laws of nature and the ordinance of God, and he censured those insisting upon the Proviso because they offered to the South a needless taunt and humiliation. He denounced the abolitionists because they had done nothing useful or good, but only aggravated the evils of slavery. He admitted that the Free States had not done their duty in returning fugitive slaves, and declared himself ready to support an effective fugitive-slave law. He denounced peaceable secession as an impossibility, and closed with an appeal for the Union.

The effect produced by the “seventh-of-March speech” on the anti-slavery men, especially in New England, was painful in the extreme. They saw in it the fall of an archangel. They denounced it as a flagrant abandonment of principle, and a profligate bid for the presidency. Their indignation was still more inflamed when Webster shortly afterwards visited Boston, sneered at the anti-slavery movement as an agitation based upon a “ghastly abstraction,” and told his constituents that Massachusetts should “conquer her local prejudices.” But those went too far who charged Webster with having originated a pro-slavery reaction at the North. Webster's speech was rather a