Obviously the persons here present were of importance.  It was equally obvious that they sought no intrusion.  Why, then, in a meeting so private and so serious, should there come a remark upon a topic certainly not a matter of state in the usual acceptance of the term?  Why should the leader have been concerned over the slight matter of a woman’s late presence here in Washington?

As though to question his associates, the speaker turned his glance down the long table, where sat figures, indistinct in the gathering gloom.  At his right hand, half in shadow, there showed the bold outlines of a leonine head set upon broad shoulders.  Under cavernous brows, dark eyes looked out with seriousness.  Half revealed as it was, here was a countenance fairly fit to be called godlike.  That this presence was animated with a brain whose decision had value, might have been learned from the flitting gaze of the leader which, cast now on this or the other, returned always to this man at the right.  There were seven gentlemen of them in all, and of these all were clad in the costume of the day, save this one, who retained the fashion of an earlier time.  His coat might have come from the Revolution, its color possibly the blue of an earlier day.  The trousers fitted close to massive and shapely limbs, and the long waistcoat, not of a modish silk, was buff in color, such as might one time have been worn by Washington himself.  This man, these men, distinguished in every line, might have been statesmen of an earlier day than that of Calhoun, Clay and Benton.  Yet the year of 1850, that time when forced and formal peace began to mask the attitude of sections already arrayed for a later war, might have been called as important as any in our history.

The ranks of these men at the table, too, might have been called arranged as though by some shrewd compromise.  Even a careless eye or ear might have declared both sections, North and South, to have been represented here.  Grave men they were, and accustomed to think, and they reflected, thus early in Millard Fillmore’s administration, the evenly balanced political powers of the time.

The headlong haste of both sections was in the year 1850 halted for a time by the sage counsels of such leaders as Clay, in the South, even Webster, in the North.  The South claimed, after the close of the Mexican War and the accession of the enormous Spanish territories to the southwest, that the accepted line of compromise established in 1820, by which slavery might not pass north of the parallel of latitude thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, should be extended westward quite to the Pacific Ocean.  She grumbled that, although she had helped fight for and pay for this territory, she could not control it, and could not move into it legally the slaves which then made the most valued part of a southern man’s property.  As against this feeling, the united politicians had thrown to the hot-headed Southerners a sop in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act.  The right for a southern owner to follow and claim his slave in any northern state was granted under the Constitution of the United States.  Under the compromise of 1850, it was extended and confirmed.