Part 34 (2/2)

Several hundred students were in attendance, gathered from all the Southern and Southwestern States.

2. Governor Morehead had been succeeded in office by William A.

Graham, of Orange. In the United States Senate, Judges Mangum and Badger were the peers of the best men of the Republic, and reflected honor on North Carolina.

3. In the House of Representatives, Colonel James I. McKay, of Bladen, had long been recognized as one of the leading men, and was chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. Messrs. Kenneth Rayner and Thomas L. Clingman were also men of recognized ability, the latter bringing varied accomplishments to aid his discharge of duty.

1849.

4. At the expiration of Governor Graham's term of office Charles Manly, of Wake, became Governor. The people of the State grew excited in the contest between Messrs. Manly and Reid over the Democratic proposition to abolish the freehold qualification of voters for State Senators. It had been, ever since 1776, necessary for a man to possess fifty acres of land to be ent.i.tled to this franchise. It was now proposed to allow all white men the privilege of suffrage.

5. Upon the election of General Taylor as President of the United States, Mr. Polk retired to private life, and soon died at Nashville, Tennessee. He was a pure and laborious man, but was not the equal of Andrew Jackson in those great natural gifts which immortalized the hero of New Orleans.

6. Upon the cessation of war with Mexico, it had been agreed in the treaty of peace that upon the payment of a large sum of money, Upper California should, with other Mexican territory, belong to the United States. The discovery of immense deposits of gold on the Pacific coast led to such immigration there that, in 1850, California was applying for admission as a State into the Union.

7. Again the spectre of coming strife and bloodshed was seen in the renewal of the struggle over the question of freedom or slavery in this new sister in the galaxy of States. Southern men like Henry Clay thought that the whole subject had been settled in 1820, when, by the Missouri Compromise, it had been ordained that involuntary servitude should not obtain north of the geographical line 36 30' north lat.i.tude.

1850.

8. It was understood that the surrender of the right to own slaves north of this line was the consideration for the admission of the right to own them south of it, and that this was what the ”compromise” meant. But they were told that the inhibition alone was effective, and that no such converse right was intended to be conveyed as that contended for by the men of the South. The most logical of these men said that Congress had exceeded its powers in the enactment mentioned, and that no power could settle the question but the people of the new State.

9. It was seen that ”Wilmot's Proviso,” which was an amendment continually offered by Mr. Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, excluding slavery from all future States, was the fixed determination of the Northern people. So, after a protracted and bitter struggle, Mr. Clay, as the last service of a long and ill.u.s.trious life, procured the pa.s.sage of the compromise of 1850, in which the only concession by Northern men was the ”Fugitive Slave Law.”

10. This statute provided that Federal courts and officers should arrest and return to their owners such slaves as should be found absconding in the different States of the Union, whether free or slave-holding. It was greeted by a prodigious outcry from the Northern press and people. They determined that this national law should not be executed, and the different legislatures of the free States began their enactment of personal liberty laws, which made it penal to aid in carrying out the law of Congress.

1851.

11. The people of the South were both exasperated and disheartened at such manifestations, and in view of such palpable violations of their plain const.i.tutional rights, began seriously to consider whether in a union with the Northern States the arbitrary will of the people of those States was not to be the rule of government rather than the Const.i.tution solemnly agreed upon between their forefathers. If this were to be so, the dream of liberty, regulated by law in the Federal Union, was at an end.

QUESTIONS.

1. What educational inst.i.tutions are mentioned?

2. Who was Governor in 1818? What two men were distinguished in the United States Senate?

3. Who were the representative men in the House?

4. Who succeeded Governor Graham in 1849? What proposition was agitating the people?

5. Who succeeded James K. Polk as President of the United States?

What is said of President Polk?

6. What events were occurring in the West?

7. What spectre of the past reappears? Relate circ.u.mstances.

8. In what condition was the question now seen?

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