The compromise bill at last became a law.  It averted the final outbreak for ten years longer, but contained elements that were to be potent factors in insuring the final crisis.

With the burden of the whole South upon his shoulders Calhoun tottered to the grave a most unhappy man, for though he saw the “irrepressible conflict” as clearly as Seward had done, he also saw that the South, even if successful, as he hoped, must go through a sea of tribulation.  When he was no longer able to address the Senate in person he still waged the battle.  His last great speech was read to the Senate by Mr. Mason of Virginia, on the 4th of March, 1850.  It was not bitter, nor acrimonious; it was a doleful lament that the Southern States could not long remain in the Union with any dignity, now that the equilibrium was destroyed.  He felt that he had failed, but also that he had done his duty; and this was his only consolation in view of approaching disasters.  On the last day of March he died, leaving behind him his principles, so full of danger and sophistries, but at the same time an unsullied name, and the memory of earlier public services and of private virtues which had secured to him the respect of all who knew him.

In reviewing the career of Mr. Calhoun it would seem that the great error and mistake of his life was his disloyalty to the Union.  When he advocated State rights as paramount over those of the general government he merely took the ground which was discussed over and over again at the formation of the Constitution, and which resulted in a compromise that, with control over matters of interest common to all States, the central government should have no power over the institution of slavery, which was a domestic affair in the Southern States.  Only these States, it was settled, had supreme control over their own “peculiar institution.”  As a politician, representing Southern interests, he cannot be severely condemned for his fear and anger over the discussion of the slavery question, which, politically considered, was out of the range of Congressional legislation or popular agitation.  But when he advocated or threatened the secession of the Southern States from the Union, unless the slavery question was let alone entirely both by Congress and the Northern States, he was unpatriotic, false in his allegiance, and unconstitutional in his utterances.  A State has a right to enter the Union or not, remaining of course, in either case, United States territory, over which Congress has legislative power.  But when once it has entered into the Union, it must remain there as a part of the whole.  Otherwise the States would be a mere league, as in the Revolutionary times.