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Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 3, Chapter 34: the compromise of 1850.—Mr. Webster. (search)
as ready for admission, making it impossible to keep the balance between the contending sections. At the same time the inhabitants of New Mexico sent a petition to Congress asking for a territorial government with a prohibition of slavery. Thus it was manifest that a war undertaken to extend and protect slavery was about to reduce the relative power of the slave States. This failure in a well-laid and long-plotted scheme made the partisans of slavery desperate. When Congress met in December, 1848, the last session of President Polk's Administration, the character of the emigration then flowing into California assured for her a majority of free State citizens. The Southern members issued an address, and organized resistance to antislavery prohibitions. They strove to obtain by some vague and covert phrase a recognition of their right under the Constitution to carry slaves into the territories; and the most outspoken and audacious among them threatened to dissolve the Union if t