er
adhering with tenacity to the administration.

DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOR.

The quarrel was growing fiercer day by day, and involving all shades
of political opinion, when it was suddenly arrested by the death
of General Taylor on the 9th of July (1850). This sad event gave
the opportunity for the success of the Compromise measures. Had
General Taylor lived, their defeat was assured. As a Southern man,
coming from a Gulf State, personally interested in the institution
of slavery, he had a vantage-ground in the struggle which a Northern
President could never attain. He had, moreover, the courage and
the intelligence to uphold his principles, even in a controversy
with Mr. Clay. His ignorance of political and civil affairs has
been grossly exaggerated. Without taking part in politics, he had
been a close observer of events, and his prolonged services at
frontier posts had afforded the leisure and enforced the taste for
reading. He knew not only the public measures, but the public men
of his time closely and appreciatively. He surprised a member of
his cabinet on a certain occasion, by objecting to a proposed
appointment on the ground that the man designated had voted for
Benton's expunging resolution at the close of Jackson's administration,
--an offense which the President would not condone. The seven
members of his cabinet, actively engaged in politics all their
lives, had forgotten an important fact which the President
instinctively remembered.

Long before General Taylor's death it was known that Mr. Fillmore
did not sympathize with the policy of the administration. He had
been among the most advanced of anti-slavery Whigs during his
service in the House of Representatives, and was placed on the
Taylor ticket as a conciliatory candidate, to hold to their allegiance
that large class of Whigs who resented the nomination of a Louisiana
slave-holder. But from the day he was sworn in as Vice-President
his antipathy to Mr. Seward began to develop. With the conceded
ability of the latter, and with his constant opportunity on the
floor of the Senate, where he won laurels from the day of his
entrance, Mr. Fillmore felt that he would himself be subordinated
and lost in the crowd of followers if he coincided with Seward.
Older in years, long senior to Mr. Seward in the national service,
he apparently could not endure to see himself displaced by a more
brilliant