o the
President a measure of protection against the hot wrath of Mr. Clay
in the memorable contest of 1841-2, and by natural reaction had
impaired the force of Mr. Clay's attack. And now ten years after
the event its memory rose to influence the Presidential nomination
of 1852.

Another explanation is more in consonance with Mr. Clay's magnanimity
of character. He was extremely anxious that an outspoken friend
of the Compromise should be nominated. He knew when he wrote his
letter that the Democrats would pledge themselves to the finality
of the Compromise, and he knew the Southern Whigs would be overwhelmed
if there should be halting or hesitation on this issue either in
their candidate or in their platform. He felt, as the responsible
author of the Compromise, that he was himself on trial, and it
would be a peculiar mortification if the party which he had led so
long should fail to sustain him in this final crisis of his public
life. He had been sufficiently humiliated by Taylor's triumph over
him in the convention of 1848. It would be an absolutely intolerable
rebuke if in 1852 Taylor's policy should be preferred to his own
by a Whig national convention. Taylor, indeed, was in his grave,
but his old military compatriot, Scott, was a candidate for the
Presidency, and the anti-Compromise Whigs under Seward's lead were
rallying to his support. Mr. Clay believed that Fillmore, with
the force of the national administration in his hands, could defeat
General Scott, and that Mr. Webster's candidacy was a needless
division of friends. Hence he sustained Fillmore, not from hostility
to Webster, but as the sure and only means of securing an indorsement
of the Compromise measures, and of doing justice to a Northern
President who had risked every thing in support of Mr. Clay's
policy.

The contest was long and earnest. Mr. Webster's friends, offended
by what they considered the ingratitude of Southern Whigs, persistently
refused to go over to Fillmore, though by so doing they could at
any moment secure his nomination. They cared nothing for Fillmore's
lead in votes, obtained as they thought in large degree from the
use of patronage. They scouted it as an argument not fit to be
addressed to the friends of Mr. Webster. Such considerations
belonged only to men of the lower grades, struggling in the dirty
pools of political strife, and were not to be applied to a statesman
of Mr. Webster's rank and character. They