Soc.; Dartmouth College; Middletown (Conn.) Hist. Soc.; Mrs.
Alfred E. Wyman.


I.

During the session of Congress of 1849-1850, the peace of the
Union was threatened by problems centering around slavery and the
territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War: California's
demand for admission with a constitution prohibiting slavery; the
Wilmot Proviso excluding slavery from the rest of the Mexican
acquisitions (Utah and New Mexico); the boundary dispute between
Texas and New Mexico; the abolition of slave trade in the
District of Columbia; and an effective fugitive slave law to
replace that of 1793.

The evidence for the steadily growing danger of secession until
March, 1850, is no longer to be sought in Congressional speeches,
but rather in the private letters of those men, Northern and
Southern, who were the shrewdest political advisers of the South,
and in the official acts of representative bodies of Southerners
in local or state meetings, state legislatures, and the Nashville
Convention. Even after the compromise was accepted in the South
and the secessionists defeated in 1850-1851, the Southern states
generally adopted the Georgia platform or its equivalent
declaring that the Wilmot Proviso or the repeal of the fugitive-
slave law would lead the South to "resist even (as a last resort)
to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the Union".
Southern disunion sentiment was not sporadic or a party matter;
it was endemic.