The tide of excitement culminated in the crisis of 1850.  The extraordinary activity of the under-ground railroad system, and its failure to open the national Territories to slave immigration had transported the South to the verge of disunion.  California, fought over by the two foes, was in the act of withdrawing herself from the field of contention to a position of independent Statehood.  It was her rap for admission into the Union as a free State which precipitated upon the country the last of the compromises between freedom and slavery.  It sounded the opening of the final act of Southern domination in the republic.

The compromise of 1850, a series of five acts, three of which it took to conciliate the South, while two were considered sufficient to satisfy the North, was, after prolonged and stormy debate, adopted to save Webster’s glorious Union.  These five acts were, in the agonized accents of Clay, to heal “the five fire gaping wounds” of the country.  But the wounds were immedicable, as events were soon to prove.  Besides, two at least of the remedies failed to operate as emollients.  They irritated and inflamed the national ulcers and provoked fresh paroxysms of the disease.  The admission of California as a free State was a sort of perpetual memento mori to the slave-power.  It hung forever over the South the Damoclean blade of Northern political ascendency in the Union.  The fugitive slave law on the other hand produced results undreamt of by its authors.  Who would have ventured to predict the spontaneous, irresistible insurrection of the humane forces and passions of the North which broke out on the passage of the infamous bill?  Who could have foretold the moral and political consequences of its execution, for instance, in Boston, which fifteen years before had mobbed anti-slavery women and dragged Garrison through its streets?  The moral indignation aroused by the law in Massachusetts swept Webster and the Whigs from power, carried Sumner to the Senate and crowned Liberty on Beacon Hill.  It worked a revolution in Massachusetts, it wrought changes of the greatest magnitude in the free States.

From this time the reign of discord became universal.  The conflict between the sections increased in virulence.  At the door of every man sat the fierce figure of strife.  It fulmined from the pulpit and frowned from the pews.  The platforms of the free States resounded with the thunder of tongues.  The press exploded with the hot passions of the hour.  Parties warred against each other.  Factions arose within parties and fought among themselves with no less bitterness.  Wrath is infectious and the wrathful temper of the nation became epidemic.  The Ishmaelitish impulse to strike something or someone, was irresistible.  The bonds which had bound men to one another seemed everywhere loosening, and people in masses were slipping away from old to enter into new combinations of political activity.  It was a period of tumultuous transition and confusion.  The times were topsy-turvy and old Night and Chaos were the angels who sat by the bubbling abysses of the revolution.