Battles Near that City

Under their State constitution, the Californians elected Edward Gilbert and G. H. Wright, delegates to the National House of Representatives; and the State Legislature, at its first session, appointed John Charles Fremont and William M. Gwinn, United States Senators. The latter carried the State constitution with them to Washington city, and in February they presented a petition to Congress, praying for the admission of California into the Union of States. It was perceived that a compromise on the subject of slavery must be effected to avoid serious difficulty, for the supporters of the system of slave-labor boldly declared their intention to dismember the republic, if California should be admitted into the Union with its constitution forbidding the existence of slavery in that domain. A joint resolution was offered for the appointment of a committee of thirteen to consider the subject of territorial governments for California, New Mexico and Deseret (the latter settled chiefly by a Mormon community), with instructions to report a plan of compromise embracing all the questions then arising out of the institution of slavery. The resolution was adopted in April, and Mr. Clay was made chairman of the committee. He had already submitted a plan of compromise to the Senate, and spoke eloquently in favor of it; and on the 8th of May he, in behalf of the committee of thirteen, reported a bill intended as a pacificator. It provided for the admission of California as a State; for a territorial government for New Mexico and Deseret or Utah; for a law which would compel the return, to their masters, of all fugitive slaves; for the suppression of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and for a settlement of the boundary of Texas. This bill, containing such a variety of important propositions, was called the "Omnibus Bill," but as a whole it was known as the Compromise Act. It was not satisfactory to the slaveholders, notwithstanding its large concessions to their interests; and in June they held a convention at Nashville, in Tennessee, and by resolutions presented to the country alternatives for the settlement of the controversy, namely, the security, by an enactment of Congress, of protection to their property in slaves, for those who should choose to emigrate into any of the Territories, or a partition of the Territories between the free and slave labor sections of the Union, on the basis of the Missouri Compromise.

For four months a discussion and a controversy, which shook the republic to its very foundations, was carried on in Congress and among the people --a controversy on the slavery question more violent than any which had yet occurred. The Compromise Act was violently opposed in both sections of the Union, but, of course, on opposite grounds. The extreme pro-slavery men regarded it as a surrender of their most vital claims, to the political sentimentality of the North; and they resolved not to submit to it. Threats of disunion were loud, violent, and numerous; and opposition to the Compromise took the shape of a political party first in Mississippi, with Jefferson Davis as leader. It spread into other slave-holding States, and appeared formidable. The opposition to the measure in the Northern States was comparatively feeble; but there was a powerful minority in these free-labor States who were strenuously opposed to the Fugitive-Slave law, which formed a part of the Compromise, as unworthy of the sanction of a civilized nation. Yet the majority of the northern people acquiesced in the measure because it promised peace and the maintenance of the commercial prosperity which then prevailed.

In the midst of the excitement occasioned by this controversy, the country was startled by the death of the President, caused by bilious fever, which occurred on the 9th of July, 1850, when he was in the sixty-fifth year of his age. There was much real mourning on account of his death, for the reflecting men of all parties relied upon his justice, integrity and firmness in the right, in that hour of apparent peril to the republic. Millard Fillmore, the Vice-President, became the constitutional successor of President Taylor, and on the day after the death of the latter, Mr. Fillmore took the prescribed oath of office as President of the United States. On the following day, William R. King, of Alabama, was elected president pro tempore of the Senate, and became acting Vice-President.

The several members of the cabinet of President Taylor tendered their resignations to Mr. Fillmore, who accepted them, and immediately nominated others for his constitutional advisers. These were Daniel Webster, Secretary of State; Thomas Corwin, Secretary of the Treasury; Charles M. Conrad, Secretary of War; William A. Graham, Secretary of the Navy; Alexander H. H. Stuart, Secretary of the Interior; Nathan K. Hall, Post-master-General, and John J. Crittenden, Attorney-General. These names impressed the people with confidence in the administration of Mr. Fillmore.