The proceedings of these caucuses were published on January 30, and the Tribune with them printed an editorial in which it asserted that nothing was ever “better adapted to the great work of arousing and fixing the North,” and added: “Then, as to the other monstrous grievance, the free States--shamed into manhood by the Abolitionists of various species1--will not permit the extension of slavery. The vast regions that came to us free must remain so.”
In October, 1849, a State convention in California adopted unanimously a constitution which excluded slavery, and this was ratified by the people by a vote of 12,066 to 811. At the instance of Mississippi, a convention of the Southern people was called to meet in Nashville, Tenn., in June, 1850, to deliberate on the threatened rights of the South, and