tes the Convention unanimously made the prohibition of
slavery part of that Constitution. There was no likelihood that, with
a further influx of settlers of the same sort, this decision of
California would alter. Was California to be admitted as a State with
this Constitution of its own choice, which the bulk of the people of
America approved?

To politicians of the school now fully developed in the South there
seemed nothing outrageous in saying that it should be refused
admission. To them Calhoun's argument, which regarded a citizen's
slave as his chattel in the same sense as his hat or walking-stick,
seemed the ripe fruit of logic. It did not shock them in the least
that they were forcing the slave system on an unwilling community, for
were not the Northerners prepared to force the free system? A
prominent Southern Senator, talking with a Northern colleague a little
later, said triumphantly: "I see how it is. You may force freedom as
much as you like, but we are to beware how we force slavery," and was
surprised that the Northerner cheerfully accepted this position. It is
necessary to remember throughout the following years that, whatever
ordinary Southerners thought in private, their whole political action
was now based on the assumption that slavery, as it was, was an
institution which no reasonable man could think wrong.

Zachary Taylor, unlike Harrison, the previous hero of the Whigs,
survived his inauguration by sixteen months. He was no politician at
all, but placed in the position of President, for which fairness and
firmness were really the greatest qualifications, he was man enough to
rely on his own good sense. He had come to Washington under the
impression that the disputes which raged there were due to the
aggressiveness of the North; a very little time there convinced him of
the contrary. Slave-owner as he was, the claim of the South to force
slavery on California struck him as an arrogant pretension, and so far
as matters rested with him, he was simply not to be moved by it. He
sent a message to Congress advising the admission of California with
the constitution of its own choice. When, as we shall shortly see, the
great men of the Senate thought the case demanded conciliation and a
great scheme of compromise, he resolutely disagreed; he used the whole
of his influence against their compromise, and it is believed with good
reason that he would have put his veto as President on the chief
me