to the Proviso inhibiting slavery in the new territory. The statement of Mr. Wilmot-which is that of an honest man, and worthy of perfect confidence-goes still further, and shows that not only was he not averse to the measure, but that he actually advised it.

It appears, therefore, Mr. Polk was an original free-soil man, one of the party who now resist the irruption of slavery into free territory. He saw at that time no objection to the Proviso; it was then no invasion of the right of the South. It was not a measure at which even the southern capitalists, whose property was invested in black men and women, ought to take umbrage; it was a measure which he thought would be agreeable even to Mississippi. In this we have little doubt that he was right. If the Proviso had not met with that unseasonable obstruction in the Senate, if its postponement to another session had not allowed the southern politicians time to get up an opposition to it, on the ground that it endangered the supremacy of the slave States in the government, its immediate adoption, we have no doubt, would have been perfectly satisfactory to every part of the country, and the prohibition of slavery in California and New Mexico would have been considered a perfectly just and reasonable measure.

Since the agents of slave owners in Congress and elsewhere have had time to form a party in opposition to the measure at first so warmly favored by Mr. Polk, he has thought fit to change his ground, and desert the friends of free soil. We might tolerate his apostasy, but what shall we say to his persecution of those who continue to think as he at first thought?

What shall we say to his conduct in setting the newspaper, established as the organ of his administration at Washington, to denounce Mr. Wilmot in the grossest terms for persevering in a course to which he originally advised him? Was it not enough that he should abandon both his creed and his discipline, but must he denounce that disciple, whose only crime is constancy to his first professions, as a fanatic, a demagogue, a traitor, a man whose only object is mischief and confusion?

What shall we say to his conduct in giving it to be understood through the same organ that any one who is the friend of free soil, was to be marked as the enemy of Mr. Polk's administration, and treated accordingly?

What shall we say to his removing Benjamin F. Butler from

the office of United States Attorney for the southern district of New York, for the crime of supporting the Proviso, which he himself urged Mr. Wilmot to lay before Congress? To Mr. Butler he was indebted, far more than to any other individual, for the nomination which made him President of the United States at a period when a multitude of circumstances conspired to promise any man who should be elected Chief Magistrate by the democratic party, a successful, prosperous, and popular adminis

The story of the second session of the Thirtieth Congress may well close with Polk's own picture of himself, sitting through the night in cold wrath, with his pockets full of ready prepared or adjustable vetoes, for any form of the Proviso which might be attached to any bill in the last hours before adjournment. He refers first to a veto he had prepared for expected bills appropriating money or lands for public improvements, and adds, with what seems almost naïve regret:

11

No bill of the kind, however, passed, and the veto message which I had prepared was not used. I will preserve it with my other valuable papers. I regard it as one of the ablest papers I have ever prepared.

I took with me, also, to the Capitol a veto message of the Wilmot Proviso, should any bill containing it be presented to me for my approval and signature. The Civil, and Diplomatic Appropriation Bill had been amended in the Senate on motion of senator Walker of Wisconsin, by inserting in it a provision of a temporary government of California & New Mexico. This amendment was pending in the Ho. Repts. and it was threatened that the Wilmot Proviso would be attached to it by that House, and it was uncertain whether a majority of the Senate might not give way & yield to the Proviso. In that event the alternative would be presented to me of defeating the whole Appropriation Bill by a veto, or of yielding my assent to the Wilmot Proviso. I did not hesitate for a moment in my course. I was prepared to veto the Bill, though the consequence would have been to convoke an extra session of Congress.

11 Polk's Diary, Vol. IV, p. 364.

He goes on to describe the remarkable situation produced by the adoption in the House of an amendment to Walker's provision, the substance of which was to continue in force the Mexican laws existing in the territory before its acquisition by the United States:

The effect of this amendment was to sanction the law of Mexico abolishing slavery in that Republic, and to sanction other very obnoxious laws.

Polk says he sat down at his table and wrote a paragraph modifying the introductory part of the prepared message on the Wilmot Proviso, which he had in his pocket, so as to meet the new form in which the amendment in the House had presented the question, and he waited sphinx-like-concealing his mind from all, until six o'clock in the morning, when the bill was presented for his signature. It "did not contain," he says, "the obnoxious amendment of the Ho. Repts. which I had resolved to veto."

CHAPTER XXI

ORGANIZATION OF THE THIRTY-FIRST CONGRESS

THE months intervening between the close of the Thirtieth Congress and the opening of the Thirty-first were comparatively quiet in the twelfth Pennsylvania district, though a State campaign broke here and there into minor swirls revolving about the great national issue. As the Reporter observed, September 26, the Proviso was injected even into the choice of canal commissioner.

Wilmot busied himself anew in the agitation for completion of the canal, and in public speaking. He was elected delegate to the State convention by the democrats of Bradford County, February 6, backed by resolutions declaring that his constituents were then, as theretofore, inalterably opposed to the extension of slavery into free territory, and believed the Proviso was best calculated to prevent such extension. They reaffirmed their support in September, with the declaration that Congress possessed legislative power over the subject of slavery in the territories of the United States, and ought to exercise that power to prevent the establishment of slavery therein. This September meeting sounded another note, of fresher interest, in giving their representative instructions "to use his best exertions at an early day of the next session of Congress to secure an acknowledgment of the independence of Hungary by the United States."

Echoes of the free-soil struggle of the preceding summer came back, in the news of a meeting at Rome, New York, assembling both factions of the democracy of that State in an effort at compromise. Nothing resulted, and Martin Van Buren was quoted as saying at Cleveland that "the great democratic party was dissolved."

Locally, however, though the storm still brooded, it was for the moment of low intensity; and yet here and there were signs that some of the original Proviso adherents were weary of the struggle against odds, and doubting whether, after all, the principle was worth all its maintenance would cost. The Tioga Eagle, feeling its way through the reactions of its readers, grew conspicuously bolder and more vicious in its assaults, and even the formerly stalwart Montrose Democrat hesitated, and voiced its uncertainty whether Wilmot was right in making the Proviso issue paramount.

On the whole, whether by subsidence of the majority or greater vociferation by the minority, the voice of the district toward the end of the year 1849 was decidedly more mixed than it had been twelve months earlier.

The records of the Congress which assembled in Washington, December 3, 1849, preserve the evidence of a momentous step in the political evolution by which Wilmot and a number of his steadfast associates were proceeding toward new and as yet imperfectly realized party ideals and organizations. He had been elected by a constituency still classed as democratica free-soil, or in New York parlance "barnburner", or "soft" wing of a historic democracy, of which, indeed, the antislaveryextension advocates earnestly declared they alone preserved the true faith and principles. But in the official roster of the House of Representatives, his name appears for the first time outside the traditional whig and democratic columns, under a new party designation--"Free-Soil." The little group thus separated were barely a dozen in number, including (besides David Wilmot) Amos Tuck, of New Hampshire; Charles Allen and Horace Mann, of Massachusetts; Walter Booth, of Connecticut; Preston King, of New York; Joshua R. Giddings, Joseph M. Root and William F. Hunter, of Ohio; George W. Julian, of Indiana; William Sprague, of Michigan, and Charles Durkee, of Wisconsin.

And yet Wilmot himself, even at this time, does not seem