Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/411

Rh tinue in the old course. Clay considered him a man of national principles, who, not by mere promises, but by acts, had won the confidence of the South, and who would, therefore, disarm the disunion feeling still active there; and, as a Northern man, too, enjoying in a large measure the respect of his own section, perhaps the only candidate capable of saving the Whig party. These expectations were disappointed, but nothing could have been more natural than that he should entertain them.

The Democratic National Convention met at Baltimore on June 1. In the Democratic ranks also there had been much dissension on the “finality” question, but it was more easily subdued by party discipline; and as the Southern interest was predominant in the Democratic organization, and the enforcement of the fugitive-slave law was insisted upon by the South, for the time being, as the principal part of the compromise not yet assured, the Democratic party, as the irony of fate would have it, gradually assumed the position of the special representative and champion of Clay's compromise. After a long struggle, the Democratic Convention nominated for the presidency Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a Northern man with Southern principles, and declared in its platform that the Democratic party would “abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the compromise measures settled by the last Congress, — the act for reclaiming fugitives from service or labor included.”