points in its game.  They were definite points, which all could see and estimate; yet a price, which was considerable, though less definite, less easy to see and to estimate, had in fact been paid for them; for the antagonism of the rich and teeming North to the Southern institution and to the Southern policy for protecting it had been spread and intensified to a degree which involved a menace fully offsetting the Southern territorial gain.  One of the indications of this state of feeling was the organization of the “Free Soil” party.

Almost simultaneously with this important advancement of the Southern policy there occurred an event, operative upon the other side, which certainly no statesman could have foreseen.  Gold was discovered in California, and in a few months a torrent of immigrants poured over the land.  The establishment of an efficient government became a pressing need.  In Congress they debated the matter hotly; the friends of the Wilmot proviso met in bitter conflict the advocates of the westward extension of the line of 36 deg. 30’.  Neither side could prevail, and amid intense excitement the Thirtieth Congress expired.  For the politicians this was well enough, but for the Californians organization was such an instant necessity that they now had to help themselves to it.  So they promptly elected a Constitutional Convention, which assembled on September 1, 1849, and adjourned on October 13.  Though this body held fifteen delegates who were immigrants from slave States, yet it was unanimous in presenting a Constitution which prohibited slavery, and which was at once accepted by a popular vote of 12,066 yeas against 811 nays.

Great then was the consternation of the Southern leaders when Californian delegates appeared immediately upon the assembling of the Thirty-first Congress, and asked for admission beneath this unlooked-for “free” charter of statehood.  The shock was aggravated by the fact that New Mexico, actually instigated thereto by the slaveholding President Taylor himself, was likely to follow close in the Californian foot-tracks.  The admission of Texas had for a moment disturbed the senatorial equilibrium between North and South, which, however, had quickly been restored by the admission of Wisconsin.  But the South had nothing to offer to counterbalance California and New Mexico, which were being suddenly filched from her confident expectation.  In this emergency those extremists in the South who offset the Abolitionists at the North fell back upon the appalling threat of disunion, which could hardly be regarded as an idle extravagance of the “hotspurs,” since it was substantially certain that the Senate would never admit California with her anti-slavery Constitution; and thus a real crisis seemed at hand.  Other questions also were cast into the seething caldron.  Texas, whose boundaries were as uncertain as the ethics of politicians, set up a claim which included nearly all New Mexico, and so would have settled the question