Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/377

Rh the Union, must rule it. It needed controlling political power, — more Slave States, more representation, an absolute veto upon all legislation hostile to it. If slavery could not obtain this within the Union, and still desired to live, it had to try its fortunes outside. Calhoun's great error was to believe that slavery could survive at all in the nineteenth century. But those who believed like him — and every Southern man who was unwilling to give up slavery would finally accept his conclusions — naturally saw in the admission of California an almost fatal blow to their cause. By that act, the last bulwark they held in the government, the numerical equality between Free States and Slave States in the Senate, and the resulting veto power of a united South, was overthrown. No arrangement could permanently satisfy them that did not secure to them beyond peradventure a speedy increase of the number of Slave States. This they understood well. They, therefore, insisted that the Missouri Compromise line should be run through the newly acquired territories to the Pacific Ocean, and that south of that line slavery should be secured by positive enactment, — or that all laws and usages existing in those territories which prohibited slavery should be declared invalid by act of Congress, in order to give free access to slavery.

But all these things the compromise failed to do. Clay emphatically refused his assent to any measure legislating slavery into free territory. He