This is the origin of the far-famed Wilmot Proviso.  It created a great flutter; but it stuck like wax, was voted into the bill, and the bill passed with it through the House.  The Senate, however, adjourned without final action on it, and so both appropriation and proviso were lost for the time.  The war continued, and at the next session the President renewed his request for the appropriation, enlarging the amount, I think, to three millions.  Again came the proviso, and defeated the measure.  Congress adjourned again, and the war went on.  In December, 1847, the new Congress assembled.  I was in the lower House that term.  The Wilmot Proviso, or the principle of it, was constantly coming up in some shape or other, and I think I may venture to say I voted for it at least forty times during the short time I was there.  The Senate, however, held it in check, and it never became a law.  In the spring of 1848 a treaty of peace was made with Mexico, by which we obtained that portion of her country which now constitutes the Territories of New Mexico and Utah and the present State of California.  By this treaty the Wilmot Proviso was defeated, in so far as it was intended to be a condition of the acquisition of territory.  Its friends, however, were still determined to find some way to restrain slavery from getting into the new country.  This new acquisition lay directly west of our old purchase from France, and extended west to the Pacific Ocean, and was so situated that if the Missouri line should be extended straight west, the new country would be divided by such extended line, leaving some north and some south of it.  On Judge Douglas’s motion, a bill, or provision of a bill, passed the Senate to so extend the Missouri line.  The proviso men in the House, including myself, voted it down, because, by implication, it gave up the southern part to slavery, while we were bent on having it all free.

In the fall of 1848 the gold-mines were discovered in California.  This attracted people to it with unprecedented rapidity, so that on, or soon after, the meeting of the new Congress in December, 1849, she already had a population of nearly a hundred thousand, had called a convention, formed a State constitution excluding slavery, and was knocking for admission into the Union.  The proviso men, of course, were for letting her in, but the Senate, always true to the other side, would not consent to her admission, and there California stood, kept out of the Union because she would not let slavery into her borders.  Under all the circumstances, perhaps, this was not wrong.  There were other points of dispute connected with the general question of Slavery, which equally needed adjustment.  The South clamored for a more efficient fugitive slave law.  The North clamored for the abolition of a peculiar species of slave trade in the District of Columbia, in connection with which, in view from the windows of the Capitol, a sort of negro livery-stable, where droves of negroes were