as a whole. An adjourned
meeting of a Southern convention which had been called before the
settlement with a view to some united and vigorous action took now a
tone so mild that it allayed, instead of exciting, the fears of
patriots. Jefferson Davis, an opponent, and Foote, a supporter of the
settlement, went before the people of Mississippi as rival candidates
for the governorship, and Davis was beaten. Yancey in Alabama was
overthrown in his own party. Only South Carolina would not be
reconciled. Throughout the North, and particularly in New England,
attempts to resist the fugitive slave law were sometimes violent and
occasionally successful, and Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts, and
Wade, from Ohio, were sent to join Seward and Chase and Hale, the
aggressive anti-slavery men in the Senate. With Sumner, whose first
important speech was an attack upon the law, Douglas instantly engaged
in the first of many bitter controversies. An attack on a law so clearly
demanded by the Constitution was, he declared, an attack on the
Constitution itself, such as no senator could make without breaking his
oath of office. But in little more than a year the lower House of
Congress voted by a good majority that the compromise measures should be
regarded as a permanent settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in
national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So
did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable
for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty
charm they calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour."

Cass, in his seventieth year, was the leading candidate before the
Democratic convention; so far as the leadership of parties can be
determined in America, he was still the leader of the party. But
Douglas, in his fortieth year, was pressing to the front. In the
preliminary campaign he was put forward as the candidate of young
America, and other State conventions than that of Illinois commended
him. At Baltimore, his supporters were enthusiastic, aggressive,
boisterous. His name in the long list of candidates always aroused an
applause which showed that he was classed with Cass and Buchanan in the
popular estimation, and not with the lesser men. Beginning with twenty
votes on the first ballot, he rose steadily until on the thirty-first he
led with ninety-two. But neither he nor Cass had a good following from
the South. An expediency candidate, acceptable t