variation from this twin birth of States--the one free, the other
slave--was in the case of Louisiana, which was admitted in 1812,
with no corresponding State from the North. Of the original Thirteen
States, seven had become free, and six maintained slavery. Of the
fifteen that were added to the Union, prior to the annexation of
Texas, eight were slave, and seven were free; so that, when Mr.
Polk took the oath of office, the Union consisted of twenty-eight
States, equally divided between slave-holding and free. So nice
an adjustment had certainly required constant watchfulness and the
closest calculation of political forces. It was in pursuit of this
adjustment that the admission of Louisiana was secured, as an
evident compensation for the loss which had accrued to the slave-
holding interest in the unequal though voluntary partition of the
Old Thirteen between North and South.

The more rapid growth of the free States in population made the
contest for the House of Representatives, or for a majority in the
Electoral college, utterly hopeless to the South; but the constitutional
equality of all the States in the Senate enabled the slave interest
to defeat any hostile legislation, and to defeat also any nominations
by the President of men who were offensive to the South by reason
of their anti-slavery character. The courts of the United States,
both supreme and district, throughout the Union, including the
clerks and the marshals who summoned the juries and served the
processes, were therefore filled with men acceptable to the South.
Cabinets were constituted in the same way. Representatives of the
government in foreign countries were necessarily taken from the
class approved by the same power. Mr. Webster, speaking in his
most conservative tone in the famous speech of March 7, 1850,
declared that, from the formation of the Union to that hour, the
South had monopolized three-fourths of the places of honor and
emolument under the Federal Government. It was an accepted fact
that the class interest of slavery, by holding a tie in the Senate,
could defeat any measure or any nomination to which its leaders
might be opposed; and thus, banded together by an absolutely cohesive
political force, they could and did dictate terms. A tie-vote
cannot carry measures, but it can always defeat them; and any
combination of votes that possesses the negative power will in the
end, if it can be firmly held, direct and control th