%376.  State of Feeling in the North.%—­Feeling in the free states ran quite as high.

1.  The legislatures of every one of them, except Iowa,[1] resolved that Congress had power and was in duty bound to prohibit slavery in the territories.

[Footnote 1:  Iowa had been admitted December 28, 1846.]

2.  Many of them bade their congressmen do everything possible to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

The struggle thus coming to an issue in the summer of 1849 was precipitated by a most unlooked-for discovery in California, which led the people of that region to take matters into their own hands.

%377.  Discovery of Gold in California.%—­One day in the month of January, 1848, while a man named Marshall was constructing a mill race in the valley of the American River in California, for a Swiss immigrant named Sutter, he saw particles of some yellow substance shining in the mud.  Picking up a few, he examined them, and thinking they might be gold, he gathered some more and set off for Sutter’s Fort, where the city of Sacramento now stands.

[Illustration:  %Sutter’s mill%]

As soon as he had reached the fort and found Mr. Sutter, the two locked themselves in a room and examined the yellow flakes Marshall had brought.  They were gold!  But to keep the secret was impossible.  A Mormon laborer, watching their excited actions at the mill race, discerned the secret, and then the news spread fast, and the whole population went wild.  Every kind of business stopped.  The stores were shut.  Sailors left the ships.  Soldiers defiantly left their barracks, and by the middle of the summer men came rushing to the gold fields from every part of the Pacific coast.  Later in the year reports reached the East, but so slowly did news travel in those days that it was not till Polk in his annual message confirmed it, that people really believed there were gold fields in California.  Then the rush from the East began.  Some went overland, some crossed by the Isthmus of Panama, some went around South America, filling California with a population of strong, adventurous, and daring men.  These were the “forty-niners.”

[Illustration:  %San Francisco in 1847%]

%378.  The Californians make a Free-State Constitution.%—­When Taylor heard that gold hunters were hurrying to California from all parts of the world, he was very anxious to have some permanent government in California; and encouraged by him the pioneers, the “forty-niners,” made a free-state constitution in 1849 and applied for admission into the Union.[1]

[Footnote 1:  For an account of this movement to make California a state, see Rhodes’s History of the United States, Vol.  I., pp. 111-116.]

%379.  Clay proposes a Compromise.%—­When Congress met in 1849 there were therefore a great many things connected with slavery to be settled: 

1.  Southern men complained that the existing fugitive-slave law was not enforced in the free states and that runaway slaves were not returned.