Union.  We furnish the water that makes the Mississippi, and we intend to follow, navigate, and use it until it loses itself in the briny ocean.  So with the St. Lawrence.  We intend to keep open and enjoy both of these great outlets to the ocean, and all between them we intend to take under our especial protection, and keep and preserve as one free, happy, and united people.  This is the mission of the great Mississippi Valley, the heart and soul of the nation and the continent."[345]

Meantime Congress was endeavoring to avert the clash of sections by other measures of accommodation.  The veteran Clay, in his favorite role of peacemaker, had drafted a series of resolutions as a sort of legislative programme; and with his old-time vigor, was pleading for mutual forbearance.  All wounds might be healed, he believed, by admitting California with her free constitution; by organizing territorial governments without any restriction as to slavery, in the region acquired from Mexico; by settling the Texas boundary and the Texas debt on a fair basis; by prohibiting the slave trade, but not slavery, in the District of Columbia; and by providing more carefully for the rendition of fugitive slaves.  Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had spoken with all the weight of their years upon these propositions, before Douglas was free to address the Senate.

It was characteristic of Douglas that he chose to speak on the concrete question raised by the application of California for admission into the Union.  His opening words betrayed no elevation of feeling, no alarmed patriotism transcending party lines, no great moral uplift.  He made no direct reference to the state of the public mind.  Clay began with an invocation; Webster pleaded for a hearing, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and as a Senator, with the preservation of the Union as his theme; Douglas sprang at once to the defense of his party.  With the brush of a partisan, he sketched the policy of Northern Democrats in advocating the annexation of Texas, repudiating the insinuations of Webster that Texas had been sought as a slave State.  He would not admit that the whole of Texas was bound to be a slave Territory.  By the very terms of annexation, provision had been made for admitting free States out of Texas.  As for Webster’s “law of nature, of physical geography,—­the law of the formation of the earth,” from which the Senator from Massachusetts derived so much comfort, it was a pity that he could not have discovered that law earlier.  The “law of nature” surely had not been changed materially since the election, when Mr. Webster opposed General Cass, who had already enunciated this general principle.[346]