telligencer, a few weeks after the close of the session of Congress which had now just terminated, Mr. William H. Seward, a newly-elected senator from the State of New York, but who had not then taken his seat as such, claimed much, and doubtless deserved credit for the success of his efforts on the last night of the session to defeat all compromise of the territorial question in the various modes proposed, preferring to keep it open for settlement by the incoming administration of General Taylor. This gentleman, it would seem, had never believed in the value of legislative compromises, and afterward, in a speech delivered by him in the month of March, 1850, when the compromise enactments of that period were under discussion, he used the following memorable words: "It is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended by a compromise of questions which have arisen out of slavery. I am opposed to any such compromise, in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed, because, while admitting the purity and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I think all legislative compromises which are not absolutely necessary radically wrong and essentially vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for ascertaining truth; they involve a relinquishment of the right to reconsider in future the decisions of the present on questions prematurely anticipated; and they are acts of usurpation as to future questions of the province of future legislators."

This gentleman had delivered a speech at Cleveland,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD.

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Ohio, in 1848, in which he had doubtless stated his conscientious convictions, the spirit and character of which will be made sufficiently evident by the citation of the following striking extracts: "There are two antagonistical elements of society in America, freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government, and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, and with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive.

"Freedom insists on the emancipation and elevation of labor; slavery demands a soil moistened with tears and blood-freedom a soil that exults under the elastic tread of man in his native majesty.

"These elements divide and classify the American people into parties. Each of these parties has its court and its sceptre. The throne of the one is amid the rocks of the Alleghany Mountains, the throne of the other is reared on the sands of South Carolina. One of these parties, the party of slavery, regards disunion as among the means of defense, and not always the last to be employed; the other maintains the Union of the States one and inseparable, now and forever, as the highest duty of the American people to themselves, to posterity, to mankind."

I have no acrimonious strictures to apply to what has just been cited. Perhaps, though, the eminent personage who delivered, with so much apparent deliberation, the celebrated Cleveland speech, will not take special of fense if I venture to suggest that what is reputed as having fallen from his lips on this very memorable occasion

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is not altogether in unison with that fine admonition of Mr. Burke's, for which he expresses his own warm regard in another one of his public addresses: "We ought to act in political affairs with all the moderation which does not absolutely enervate that vigor, and guard that fervency of spirit without which the best wishes for the public good must evaporate in empty speculation." I will also add here that, ten years subsequent to the delivery of this anti-compromise speech, Mr. Seward, as will be seen hereafter, distinguished himself not a little as a champion of compromise.

It was now evident—that is to say, on the 4th of March, 1849-that a conflict of sectional forces was impending which it would require all the vigilance, wisdom, and energy of the best and ablest men that the whole republic contained to bring to a peaceful termination. Sectionalism, fierce and uncompromising, and which some began to fear might prove irrepressible also, was now rampant alike in the North and in the South, and redoubted chieftains on either side of Mason and Dixon's line were industriously organizing their forces for the coming collision.

General Taylor's administration, then occupying the seats of executive trust in Washington, mainly, as was very soon ascertained, under the influence and counsels of Mr. Seward, whose energy, zeal, and adroitness as a party tactician secured him an ascendency exceedingly difficult to counteract, was not slow in marking out the policy which it would adopt in regard to the vexed territorial question, which, as has been seen, had been purposely left in an unsettled condition, with a view to the

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GENERAL TAYLOR'S NON-ACTION POLICY. attainment of ends which the light of subsequent events has relieved from the obscurity which originally enshrouded them. The highest historic authority which could be cited on this interesting point (Mr. Greeley's American Conflict) contains the following precise and important statement:

"The new administration appears to have promptly resolved on its course. It decided to invite and favor an early organization of both California and New Mexico. (including all the vast area recently ceded by Mexico, apart from Texas proper) as incipient states, and to urge their admission as such into the Union at the earliest practicable day. Of course it was understood that, being thus organized, in the absence of both slaveholders and slaves, they would almost necessarily become free states."

It will not be denied that this was the very first occasion in our annals in which an American president had regarded himself as justified in intermeddling with territories in an incipient and as yet only partially organized condition, for the purpose of swelling the number of sovereign members of the confederacy; and the precedent was justly felt to be one of most alarming import by many who were, upon other and independent grounds, quite willing to see California enter the Union, by reason of the fact that both California and New Mexico were yet under strict military rule, and could be scarcely expected to act in this most important transaction with that independence and exemption from exterior influence which is in all such cases confessedly so eminently desirable. In response to a special congressional call for information on this subject, the frank and outspoken sol

dier then in the executive chair did not hesitate to confess that he had declared to the people of the territories in question his "desire that they should, if prepared to comply with the requisitions of the Constitution of the United States, form a plan of a state Constitution, and submit the same to Congress, with a prayer for admission into the Union as a state." It was not to be expected that the territories thus encouraged to act would long delay the putting on of the wedding garment, preparatory to the political banquet to which they had been thus affectionately invited. General Riley, then military governor of California, under instructions from Washington, issued a proclamation calling into existence a convention of the people of California, the delegates to which body were in a few weeks elected, after which, with all practicable dispatch, they came together, and proceeded to frame their state Constitution. It must be confessed that no one at all acquainted with the general character of the soil in California, and its extraordinary and widely-diffused mineral riches, would at all censure the enterprising and astute population of that fair and teeming region for preferring to exclude slave labor altogether from their newly-organized state, to the introduction of myriads of the dusky sons of Africa, probably under the control and direction of selfish and mercenary owners, into the most attractive and profitable mining districts, thus crowding out the enterprising and hardy pioneers from the old states, and stamping upon their honest industrial labors the inevitable brand of discredit.

It is a curious and not altogether uninstructive fact, that of the two United States senators from the new State