es, viz., fealty to party.
But in 1848 not even this slender link was intact.

The anti-slavery uprising was a fast growing factor in the politics of
the free States. This was evinced by the aggressiveness of anti-slavery
legislation, the repeal of slave sojournment laws, the enactment of
personal liberty laws, the increasing preference manifested by Whig and
by Democratic electors for anti-slavery Whig, and anti-slavery
Democratic leaders. Seward and Chase, and Hale and Hamlin, Thaddeus
Stevens and Joshua R. Giddings, were all in Congress in 1849. A
revolution was working in the North; a revolution was working in the
South. New and bolder spirits were rising to leadership in both
sections. On the Southern stage were Jefferson Davis, Barnwell Rhett,
David Atchison, Howell Cobb, Robert Toombs, and James M. Mason. The
outlook was portentous, tempestuous.

The tide of excitement culminated in the crisis of 1850. The
extraordinary activity of the under-ground railroad system, and its
failure to open the national Territories to slave immigration had
transported the South to the verge of disunion. California, fought over
by the two foes, was in the act of withdrawing herself from the field of
contention to a position of independent Statehood. It was her rap for
admission into the Union as a free State which precipitated upon the
country the last of the compromises between freedom and slavery. It
sounded the opening of the final act of Southern domination in the
republic.

The compromise of 1850, a series of five acts, three of which it took to
conciliate the South, while two were considered sufficient to satisfy
the North, was, after prolonged and stormy debate, adopted to save
Webster's glorious Union. These five acts were, in the agonized accents
of Clay, to heal "the five fire gaping wounds" of the country. But the
wounds were immedicable, as events were soon to prove. Besides, two at
least of the remedies failed to operate as emollients. They irritated
and inflamed the national ulcers and provoked fresh paroxysms of the
disease. The admission of California as a free State was a sort of
perpetual _memento mori_ to the slave-power. It hung forever over the
South the Damoclean blade of Northern political ascendency in the Union.
The fugitive slave law on the other hand produced results undreamt of by
its authors. Who would have ventured to predict the spontaneous,
irresistible insurrection of the humane forces and passion