asure in which the compromise issued. If he had lived to carry out
his policy, it seems possible that there would have been an attempt to
execute the threats of secession which were muttered--this time in
Virginia. But it is almost certain that at that time, and with the
position which he occupied, he would have been able to quell the
movement at once. There is nothing to suggest that Taylor was a man of
any unusual gifts of intellect, but he had what we may call character,
and it was the one thing wanting in political life at the time. The
greatest minds in American politics, as we shall see, viewed the
occasion otherwise, but, in the light of what followed, it seems a
signal and irreparable error that, when the spirit of aggression rising
in the South had taken definite shape in a demand which was manifestly
wrongful, it was bought off and not met with a straightforward refusal.
Taylor died in the course of 1850 and Vice-President Millard Fillmore,
of New York, succeeded him. Fillmore had an appearance of grave and
benign wisdom which led a Frenchman to describe him as the ideal ruler
of a Republic, but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet
nerveless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to
America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple.

The actual issue of the crisis was that the admission of California was
bought from the South by large concessions in other directions. This
was the proposal of Henry Clay, who was now an old man anxious for the
Union, but had been a lover of such compromises ever since he promoted
the Missouri Compromise thirty years ago; but, to the savage
indignation of some of his Boston admirers, Webster used the whole
force of his influence and debating power in support of Clay. The
chief concessions made to the South were two. In the first place
Territorial Governments were set up in New Mexico and Utah (since then
the home of the Mormons) without any restriction on slavery. This
concession was defended in the North on the ground that it was a sham,
because the physical character of those regions made successful slave
plantations impossible there. But it was, of course, a surrender of
the principle which had been struggled for in the Wilmot Proviso during
the last four years; and the Southern leaders showed the clearness of
their limited vision by valuing it just upon that ground. There had
been reason for the territorial concession