J. Q. ADAMS AND J. C. CALHOUN COMPARED. 91

Between John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams there were remarkable points both of resemblance and of dissimilitude. They were both men of undoubted personal integrity; alike amiable and exemplary in domestic and in social life; fervent lovers of their country, yet of decided local bias; assiduous and untiring in their application to business, and cherishing equally the strictest notions of frugality in the appropriation and expenditure of the public money. So far were both these statesmen from being personally tainted with fraud, or even suspected of a disposition to participate in corrupt bargaining and traffic in connection with concerns of government, that it may be now safely asserted that no .man who justly suspected himself of gross obliquity of purpose would have even ventured to challenge familiar intercourse with either of these sternly upright men. One of them was principally a profound logician, while the other was a spirited and powerful debater, not pre-eminently distinguished for argumentative power, nor yet, indeed, wholly deficient therein. Mr. Calhoun was profoundly metaphysical in his habits of thought, and had penetrated deeply into all the mysterious arcana connected with the fundamental principles of government; and he poured forth occasionally, in his moments of highest exertion, such a continued series of massive and strongly interlinked deductions, constantly advancing from one Alpine height of argument to another, that the mind of the ordinary hearer was often most painfully exercised in attempting to follow his giant intellectual strides, and even the reporters themselves complained that, with aching and overpowered brain, they were often compelled to re

linquish in despair the arduous and impossible task of marking down the successive steps of his Herculean progress. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Calhoun were members of Mr. Monroe's cabinet, and are understood to have there differed, though not unkindly, upon several questions of no little magnitude and importance. Mr. Adams has left behind him the charge that Mr. Calhoun voted in that cabinet for yielding the Executive sanction to what is known as the Missouri Compromise; while Mr. Calhoun asserted, more than once, in the Senate, in my hearing, that his formerly official associate had, in making this statement, committed a grave and surprising error of memory. Who can believe now that either of these illustrious statesmen intended To violate truth?

At this moment, when African slavery has been swept from the face of this continent by the remorseless scythe of war, and when all of us must distinctly recognize the fact that every vestige even of its former existence must inevitably soon disappear forever, surely, both on the one side and on the other, the proper time may be regarded as having arrived when even what may have been deemed gross errors of judgment in regard to the dark and difficult constitutional question involved in the policy of restriction may at last be forgiven. When such men as Adams, Webster, Clay, Van Buren, Story, M'Lane, and Curtis assert the power of Congress to prohibit the entrance of slavery into the territories of the Union, and when such men as Calhoun and Douglas, Taney, Grier, Campbell, and Nelson assert exactly the contrary, it seems to me that ordinary Christian charity, and a becoming deference to acknowledged intellectual

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power and indisputable integrity of character, might prompt a decent and civil avoidance of rude and acrimonious invective, either on the part of the advocates of slavery restriction, or on the part of those who were formerly its adversaries.

CHAPTER VI.

Session of Congress closing on the 3d of March, 1849.-Important Test Question raised by Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, in Connection with the Oregon Bill, which was then pending.-Defeat of Mr. Douglas's Proposition by the unexpected but effective Interposition of Mr. Wm. H. Seward, who had not yet taken his Seat as a Senator from New York. -Mr. Seward at that Time opposed to all Compromise of the Slavery Question.-Extract from a memorable Speech of his, delivered in the United States Senate in the Year 1850, having Relation to this Subject. -Mr. Seward's Cleveland Speech in 1848.-Important Extracts therefrom.-General Taylor's Administration.-Violent Excitement beginning to rage both North and South upon the Slavery Question, and in Connection with the Admission of California.-Unfortunate non-action Policy of General Taylor's Administration.-Alarming Condition of the Country.-Election of Messrs. Gwin and Fremont United States Senators from California.-Attempt of Colonel Thomas H. Benton to revive his decaying Popularity by becoming the Champion of Californian Admission.-Efforts of the Author to defeat this Scheme of selfish Ambition. Retrospect of Colonel Benton's Attempt, about the Close of Mr. Polk's Administration, to bring about the Rescission of the Treaty with Mexico, by which all the territorial Domain recently acquired would have been lost to the United States but for the Defeat of that Attempt.-Signal Defeat of this unpatriotic Scheme, and remarkable Particulars connected therewith not heretofore divulged.Colonel Benton deprived in Democratic Caucus of the Chairmanship of the Committee of Foreign Affairs in the Senate on the Motion of the Author, after a two-days' Struggle, by a Majority of one Vote only.— Mr. Benton's extraordinary Attack on Mr. Calhoun and Others in his public Speech delivered in Missouri in the Summer of 1848, and Mr. Calhoun's overwhelming Response thereto, drawn up at Author's earnest Instance.-Short Sketch of Colonel Benton's public Character, and Delineation of his intellectual Qualities.

OREGON QUESTION-STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS.

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IN the last days of the session of Congress terminating on the night of the 3d of March, 1849, Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, raised an important test question in connection with the bill then on its passage for the organization of the new Territory of Oregon, by the introduction of the following amendment thereto :

"That the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes of north latitude, known as the Missouri Compromise line, as defined in the eighth section of an act entitled 'An Act to authorize the people of the Missouri Territory to form a Constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, and to prohibit slavery in certain territories, approved March 6th, 1820,' be, and the same is, hereby declared to extend to the Pacific Ocean; and the said eighth section, together with the compromise therein effected, is hereby revived, and declared to be in full force and binding for the future organization of the territories of the United States, in the same sense and with the same understanding with which it was originally adopted." This amendment was carried in the Senate, but defeated in the House by an almost strictly sectional vote; so that the author of "The American Conflict" would seem to be justified in the following declaration which he has made in the thirteenth chapter of his voluminous and interesting work: "So Oregon became a territory consecrated to free labor without compromise or counterbalance, and the Free States gave notice that they would not divide with slavery the vast and hitherto free territories then just acquired from MEXICO."

In a well-known letter published in the National In