Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/467

Rh blow. It had fought for more slave States and conquered for more free States. The admission of California would hopelessly destroy the balance of power between freedom and slavery in the Senate. The country soon was ablaze with excitement. In the North the anti-slavery feeling ran high. The “fire-eaters” of the South, exasperated beyond measure by their disappointment, vociferously threatened to disrupt the Union. Henry Clay, true to his record, hoped to avert the danger by a compromise. He sought to reconcile the South to the inevitable admission of California by certain concessions to slavery, among them the ill-famed and ill-fated fugitive-slave law—a law offensive not only to anti-slavery sentiment, but also to the common impulses of humanity and to the pride of manhood.

Webster had to choose. The anti-slavery men of New England, and even many of his conservative friends, hoped and expected that he would again, as he had done in nullification times, proudly plant the Union flag in the face of a disunion threat, with a defiant refusal of concession to a rebellious spirit, and give voice to the moral sense of the North. But Webster chose otherwise. On the 7th of March, 1850, he spoke in the Senate. The whole country listened with bated breath. While denouncing secession and pleading for the Union in glowing periods, he spoke of slavery in regretful but almost apologetic accents, upbraided the abolitionists as mischievous marplots, earnestly advocated the compromise and commended that feature of it which was most odious to Northern sentiment—the fugitive-slave law.

From this “Seventh of March Speech”—by that name it has passed into history—Webster never recovered. It stood in too striking a contrast to the “Reply to Hayne.” There was, indeed, still the same lucid comprehensiveness of statement. The heavy battalions of argument marched