This condition of things in Congress was the controlling cause of secession.
In 1848 the Free-Soilers, as the abolition party named themselves, made a considerable show of power by the nomination of Martin Van Buren for President of the United States, upon a Free-Soil platform, which prohibited thereafterwards the admission of any State which had established the institution of slavery by its constitution. The party had strength enough to defeat Cass, the Democratic candidate for President, and thus elected Taylor, the Whig candidate, a Southern slaveholder. The Abolitionists had put up a candidate for President at previous elections, but their vote was so small that it was never a factor in the political result.
Taylor lived but fifteen months after his inauguration in 1849, and Vice-President Millard Fillmore became President. Under the Missouri compromise act, it was provided that other States coming in thereafterwards might be admitted as free States if such was the wish of the people forming the new States. Near the close of Fillmore's administration a new compromise measure was passed, which included the fugitive slave act. The original law, passed in the early days of the republic, was to be executed through tile medium of State officers, but the execution of this new fugitive slave law was put wholly into the hands of the courts and officers of the United States. The principle of this act, so it is stated, was that of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and Territories. Congress declined either to legislate slavery into any Territory or State or to exclude it therefrom, but left the people thereof perfectly free to form or regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.
This act was carried through largely by the influence and eloquence of Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, but it was his political death knell. As we have already seen, he was succeeded in the United States Senate by Charles Sumner, a declared Free-Soiler. The
