Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/381

Rh ing desire to meddle with other people's business. They never appreciated it as the great moral force which it was, and which in the very nature of things would not yield to any compromise. Slave-holder as Clay was, and kind and considerate to his slaves, taking generous care of their well-being, he, with all his anti-slavery instincts and impulses, never fully comprehended the feeling of abhorrence with which the non-slave-holding world looked at the unjust power held by one man over another. But for the business of catching fugitive slaves he himself had no taste. In the course of the debate he said that while he had, with great pleasure, several times given his services as an attorney to negroes trying to prove their freedom, he had only once, very reluctantly, appeared against one to oblige a near friend, and then only after having become perfectly satisfied that the negro really was a slave. And now the fugitive-slave law was to make the citizens of the Free States do for the slave-holders what not a few of the slave-holders were too proud to do for themselves. Such a law could not but fail. But then it would increase the exasperation of the slave-holders by its failure, while exasperating the people of the Free States by the attempts at enforcement. Thus the compromise of 1850, instead of securing peace and harmony, contained in the most important of its provisions the seeds of new and greater conflicts.

One effect it produced which Calhoun had clearly predicted when he warned the slave-holding states