In the winter of 1848 gold was discovered in California.  Throughout 1849 gold-seekers came pouring in from every part of the world.  This miscellaneous new people, whose rough ways have been more celebrated in literature than those of any similar crowd, lived at first in considerable anarchy, but they determined without delay to set up some regular system of government.  In the course of 1849 they elected a Convention to draw up a State Constitution, and to the astonishment of all the States the Convention unanimously made the prohibition of slavery part of that Constitution.  There was no likelihood that, with a further influx of settlers of the same sort, this decision of California would alter.  Was California to be admitted as a State with this Constitution of its own choice, which the bulk of the people of America approved?

To politicians of the school now fully developed in the South there seemed nothing outrageous in saying that it should be refused admission.  To them Calhoun’s argument, which regarded a citizen’s slave as his chattel in the same sense as his hat or walking-stick, seemed the ripe fruit of logic.  It did not shock them in the least that they were forcing the slave system on an unwilling community, for were not the Northerners prepared to force the free system?  A prominent Southern Senator, talking with a Northern colleague a little later, said triumphantly:  “I see how it is.  You may force freedom as much as you like, but we are to beware how we force slavery,” and was surprised that the Northerner cheerfully accepted this position.  It is necessary to remember throughout the following years that, whatever ordinary Southerners thought in private, their whole political action was now based on the assumption that slavery, as it was, was an institution which no reasonable man could think wrong.

Zachary Taylor, unlike Harrison, the previous hero of the Whigs, survived his inauguration by sixteen months.  He was no politician at all, but placed in the position of President, for which fairness and firmness were really the greatest qualifications, he was man enough to rely on his own good sense.  He had come to Washington under the impression that the disputes which raged there were due to the aggressiveness of the North; a very little time there convinced him of the contrary.  Slave-owner as he was, the claim of the South to force slavery on California struck him as an arrogant pretension, and so far as matters rested with him, he was simply not to be moved by it.  He sent a message to Congress advising the admission of California with the constitution of its own choice.  When, as we shall shortly see, the great men of the Senate thought the case demanded conciliation and a great scheme of compromise, he resolutely disagreed; he used the whole of his influence against their compromise, and it is believed with good reason that he would have put his veto as President on the chief measure in which the compromise