this presence was animated with a brain whose
decision had value, might have been learned from the flitting gaze
of the leader which, cast now on this or the other, returned always
to this man at the right. There were seven gentlemen of them in
all, and of these all were clad in the costume of the day, save
this one, who retained the fashion of an earlier time. His coat
might have come from the Revolution, its color possibly the blue of
an earlier day. The trousers fitted close to massive and shapely
limbs, and the long waistcoat, not of a modish silk, was buff in
color, such as might one time have been worn by Washington himself.
This man, these men, distinguished in every line, might have been
statesmen of an earlier day than that of Calhoun, Clay and Benton.
Yet the year of 1850, that time when forced and formal peace began
to mask the attitude of sections already arrayed for a later war,
might have been called as important as any in our history.

The ranks of these men at the table, too, might have been called
arranged as though by some shrewd compromise. Even a careless eye
or ear might have declared both sections, North and South, to have
been represented here. Grave men they were, and accustomed to
think, and they reflected, thus early in Millard Fillmore's
administration, the evenly balanced political powers of the time.

The headlong haste of both sections was in the year 1850 halted for
a time by the sage counsels of such leaders as Clay, in the South,
even Webster, in the North. The South claimed, after the close of
the Mexican War and the accession of the enormous Spanish
territories to the southwest, that the accepted line of compromise
established in 1820, by which slavery might not pass north of the
parallel of latitude thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, should be
extended westward quite to the Pacific Ocean. She grumbled that,
although she had helped fight for and pay for this territory, she
could not control it, and could not move into it legally the slaves
which then made the most valued part of a southern man's property.
As against this feeling, the united politicians had thrown to the
hot-headed Southerners a sop in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act.
The right for a southern owner to follow and claim his slave in any
northern state was granted under the Constitution of the United
States. Under the compromise of 1850, it was extended and
confirmed.

The abolitionists of the North rose in