418 Deaths of Calhoun, Webster and Clay. [i 350-2 and did not hesitate industriously to organise every possible means of evading it. State Courts and even State legislatures put every possible obstacle in the way of the law's enforcement ; and for a while men could talk of nothing else but the hateful operation of the Fugitive Slave Law. The disturbing effects of all this upon the composition and aims of parties, and upon the action of the general government in affairs of domestic policy, were enhanced by the disappearance of the old party leaders. Calhoun died in March, 1850, the central month of the great Compromise debates died stricken at heart, as it must have seemed to all who observed him closely, because forced in those last days to see with his keen eye of prophecy what the years to come must inevit- ably bring to pass. He had told those about him that the South was stronger now than she could ever be again, and must insist now or never upon what she considered her rights under the Constitution ; that she had yielded too much when she consented to the Missouri Com- promise of 1820, and must utterly lose the game of power if she conceded more ; that the preservation of the Union depended upon the maintenance of an equilibrium between the Slave States and the Free, and that the Union must go to pieces unless that equilibrium, already destroyed, should be restored. He knew in those last sad days that it could not be restored, and that the Union he had loved and lived for must enter on its struggle with death. His own hand, more than any other man's, had wrought to bring the struggle on, because what he deemed his duty had bidden him to the work. He had drawn out the plot of the tragedy ; but must have thanked God he was not to see it played out. He had designed it to be a warning : it had turned out to be a prophecy. Webster and Clay survived him two years. Clay died in June, 1852, and Webster followed him in October. They had employed all their remaining power in the task of maintaining peace between the parties under the Compromise of 1850. Webster had gone about the country reproving agitation, speaking of the compromise measures, in his solemn and impressive way, as a new compact, a new stay and guarantee of the Constitution itself, the pledge and covenant of domestic peace. He had, indeed, sacrificed a great deal to effect the adjustment he so earnestly defended. He had lost many a friend and had infinitely saddened his own old age by advocating accommodation between the contending forces of North and South. Many thought this accommo- dation an utter abandonment of the gallant position he had taken in 1832, when he had faced Senator Hayne so successfully with his confident vindication of the sovereign authority of the general govern- ment. Men who had once trusted him to the utmost now denounced him with cutting bitterness as an apostate and an enemy of the Union. But he endured the shame, as he thought, so that the Union might be
