issued.  If he had lived to carry out his policy, it seems possible that there would have been an attempt to execute the threats of secession which were muttered—­this time in Virginia.  But it is almost certain that at that time, and with the position which he occupied, he would have been able to quell the movement at once.  There is nothing to suggest that Taylor was a man of any unusual gifts of intellect, but he had what we may call character, and it was the one thing wanting in political life at the time.  The greatest minds in American politics, as we shall see, viewed the occasion otherwise, but, in the light of what followed, it seems a signal and irreparable error that, when the spirit of aggression rising in the South had taken definite shape in a demand which was manifestly wrongful, it was bought off and not met with a straightforward refusal.  Taylor died in the course of 1850 and Vice-President Millard Fillmore, of New York, succeeded him.  Fillmore had an appearance of grave and benign wisdom which led a Frenchman to describe him as the ideal ruler of a Republic, but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet nerveless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple.

The actual issue of the crisis was that the admission of California was bought from the South by large concessions in other directions.  This was the proposal of Henry Clay, who was now an old man anxious for the Union, but had been a lover of such compromises ever since he promoted the Missouri Compromise thirty years ago; but, to the savage indignation of some of his Boston admirers, Webster used the whole force of his influence and debating power in support of Clay.  The chief concessions made to the South were two.  In the first place Territorial Governments were set up in New Mexico and Utah (since then the home of the Mormons) without any restriction on slavery.  This concession was defended in the North on the ground that it was a sham, because the physical character of those regions made successful slave plantations impossible there.  But it was, of course, a surrender of the principle which had been struggled for in the Wilmot Proviso during the last four years; and the Southern leaders showed the clearness of their limited vision by valuing it just upon that ground.  There had been reason for the territorial concessions to slavery in the past generation because it was established in the territories concerned; but there was no such reason now.  The second concession was that of a new Federal law to ensure the return of fugitive slaves from the free States.  The demand for this was partly factitious, for the States in the far South, which were not exposed to loss of slaves, were the most insistent on it, and it would appear that the Southern leaders felt it politic to force the acceptance of the measure in a form which would humiliate their opponents.  There is no escape