It may be readily admitted that there was a great and perilous political crisis in 1850, as Mr. Webster said.  In certain quarters, in the excitement of party strife, there was a tendency to deride Mr. Webster as a “Union-saver,” and to take the ground that there had been no real danger of secession.  This, as we can see now very plainly, was an unfounded idea.  When Congress met, the danger of secession was very real, although perhaps not very near.  The South, although they intended to secede as a last resort, had no idea that they should be brought to that point.  Menaces of disunion, ominous meetings and conventions, they probably calculated, would effect their purpose and obtain for them what they wanted, and subsequent events proved that they were perfectly right in this opinion.  On February 14 Mr. Webster wrote to Mr. Harvey:—­

“I do not partake in any degree in those apprehensions which you say some of our friends entertain of the dissolution of the Union or the breaking up of the government.  I am mortified, it is true, at the violent tone assumed here by many persons, because such violence in debate only leads to irritation, and is, moreover, discreditable to the government and the country.  But there is no serious danger, be assured, and so assure our friends.”

The next day he wrote to Mr. Furness, a leader of the anti-slavery party, expressing his abhorrence of slavery as an institution, his unwillingness to break up the existing political system to secure its abolition, and his belief that the whole matter must be left with Divine Providence.  It is clear from this letter that he had dismissed any thought of assuming an aggressive attitude toward slavery, but there is nothing to indicate that he thought the Union could be saved from wreck only by substantial concessions to the South.  Between the date of the letter to Harvey and March 7, Mr. Curtis says that the aspect of affairs had materially changed, and that the Union was in serious peril.  There is nothing to show that Mr. Webster thought so, or that he had altered the opinion which he had expressed on February 14.  In fact, Mr. Curtis’s view is the exact reverse of the true state of affairs.  If there was any real and immediate danger to the Union, it existed on February 14, and ceased immediately afterwards, on February 16, as Dr. Von Holst correctly says, when the House of Representatives laid on the table the resolution of Mr. Root of Ohio, prohibiting the extension of slavery to the territories.  By that vote, the victory was won by the slave-power, and the peril of speedy disunion vanished.  Nothing remained but to determine how much the South would get from their victory, and how hard a bargain they could drive.  The admission of California was no more of a concession than a resolution not to introduce slavery in Massachusetts would have been.  All the rest of the compromise plan, with the single exception of the prohibition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, was