months of 1850,1that California should be admitted to the Union as a free State, with the constitution she had herself formed; that the rest of the Mexican cession should be left open to slavery, should events and the movement of population out of the South establish it there; that the slave trade should be abolished in the District of Columbia; and that a stringent fugitive slave law should provide the southerners with effective legal means of recovering runaway slaves. Such was the bundle of measures that had to be got together to quiet all parties.

Meanwhile Mr. Calhoun was dead (March 31, 1850), while compromise yet hung doubtful,-and the President himself (July 9, 1850), of a sudden fever; and Mr. Fillmore was President, a man more amenable to the control of the leaders of Congress and of his party than the sturdy soldier had been whom he succeeded. The face of affairs had changed again with the settlement of the principles of compromise.

It meant more than the mere passing away of a notable figure that Mr. Calhoun was dead at such a juncture, a tall, spare old man, the lines of whose striking face and haunting, deep-set eyes marked him as the very embodiment of a single stern and watchful purpose, an ascetic knight challenger set down in lonely guard to keep an ancient shrine of doctrine. Eight years before he had told his friends upon what single principle he had acted since 1825, and must ever act so long as he remained upon the field of action. He had opposed Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay, had first supported General Jackson and then turned from him, had acted with the Whigs against Mr. Van Buren and with Mr. Tyler against the Whigs always with this one hope and pur

1 See page 325.

140

See page 329.

pose, "to restore the old state rights Republican doctrines of '98; under the solemn belief that on their restoration the existence of our free popular institutions depended." He came of the hard - willed, indomitable stuff of the north of Ireland, and showed in all his strenu

ous course "the definite mind, the inflexible purpose, the reserved, self-restrained, somewhat ungenial temper of the Ulsterman." When he went off the stage politics seemed bereft of some force as of private and personal conviction, and left to the guidance of men who looked for their opportunity, not for their day of justification.

Our leading general authorities are still George Tucker, volume IV., Bryant and Gay, volume IV., James Schouler, volumes IV.

and V., and H. von Holst, volumes II.-VI. Here we begin to have as guide Mr. James Ford Rhodes's History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, volumes I. and II. We turn also, as before, to Carl Schurz's Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt's Thomas H. Benton in the American Statesmen Series; Calvin Colton's Life and Speeches of Henry Clay; George Ticknor Curtis's Life of Daniel Webster and Life of James Buchanan; Alexander Johnston's History of American Politics; Edward Stanwood's History of the Presidency; and A. W. Young's American Statesman.

The list of special authorities on particular topics or individual aspects of the history of the time is very long. The following may represent the whole. J. N. Larned's History for Ready Reference, which, under the title United States and under various special titles connected with the history of the country, contains copious and admirably selected extracts from the best writers; Lalor's Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and United States History; J. McK. Ormsby's History of the Whig Party; Henry A. Wise's Seven Decades of the Union; Alexander H. Stephens's Constitutional View of the War between the States; R. S. Ripley's War With Mexico; William Jay's The Mexican War; A. M. Williams's Sam Houston and the War of Independence in Texas; C. E. Lester's Houston and His Republic; R. D. Hunt's Genesis of California's First Constitution in the thirteenth volume of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science; D. King's Thomas W. Dorr, a Life of the leader of the rebellion in Rhode Island; E. R. Potter's Considerations on Questions on Rhode Island; E. P. Cheyney's Anti-Rent Agitation in New York; James Russell Soley's Wars of the United States, James B. Angell's Diplomacy of the United States, and Winsor and Channing's Territorial Acquisitions and Divisions in the seventh volume of Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America; Albert Gallatin's Right of the United States of America to the North Eastern Boundary; William Barrows's Oregon in the American Commonwealth Series.

Among the most useful biographies are Lyon G. Tyler's Letters and Times of the Tylers; Josiah Quincy's Life of John Quincy Adams; W. W. Story's Life of Joseph Story; E. M. Shepard's Martin Van Buren in the American Statesmen Series; F. W. Seward's Seward at Washington (1846-1861); E. L. Pierce's Life of Charles Sumner; Pleasant Stovall's Life of Robert Toombs; William P. Trent's Life of W. G. Simms; A. C. McLaughlin's Lewis Cass in the American Statesmen Series; Nicolay and Hay's Life

of Lincoln; and Albert B. Hart's Salmon P. Chase in the American Statesmen Series.

Among the innumerable writings on slavery and the slavery question which now begin to be useful the following may be mentioned: Horace Greeley's American Conflict and History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension; W. Goodell's Slavery and AntiSlavery; the first volume of J. W. Draper's History of the Civil War; E. A. Pollard's Lost Cause; Henry Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power; Hodgson's Cradle of the Confederacy; George Lunt's Origin of the Late War; Marion G. McDougall's Fugitive Slaves; W. P. and F. J. Garrison's Life of William Lloyd Garrison; W. H. Siebert's Underground Railroad; Thomas R. R. Cobb's Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery and Historical Sketch of Slavery; J. C. Hurd's Law of Freedom and Bondage; Charles Francis Adams's Life of Richard Henry Dana; William Jay's Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery; Leveret W. Spring's Kansas in the American Commonwealth Series; Eli Thayer's Kansas Crusade.

Shosuke Sato's Land Question, in the fourth volume of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science treats of the system of public lands which underlay the westward expansion; Mr. F. W. Taussig's Tariff History sketches the political and economic aspects of tariff legislation; and Mr. David Kinley's Independent Treasury System narrates the various vicissitudes through which Mr. Van Buren's favorite plans passed before their final acceptance by Congress.

The chief sources are the Register of Debates; the Congressional Documents; the Congressional Globe; Thomas H. Benton's Abridgment of the Debates of Congress; Niles's Register, besides which the National Era (Washington), the New York Times, the New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post become available for contemporary matter; Thomas H. Benton's Thirty Years' View; Nathan Sargent's Public Men and Events; John Quincy Adams's Memoirs; Martin Van Buren's Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Political Parties in the United States; Chevalier de Bacourt's Souvenirs of a Diplomat; Mrs. Chapman Coleman's Life of John J. Crittenden; Alexander Johnston's Representative American Orations; Hugh McCulloch's Men and Measures of Half a Century; George W. Curtis's Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley; Amos Kendall's Autobiography; Thurlow Weed's Autobiography; Herndon's Life of Lincoln; F. W. Seward's Seward: An Autobiography; Frederick Law Olmsted's Cotton Kingdom; Ben: Perley Poore's Perley's Reminiscences; W. Kennedy's Rise and Prospects