from Congress, certainly could not. They insisted emphatically on the right of the slave-holder under the Constitution to take his slaves into the territories.
It is a remarkable fact that the same Congress, which thus discussed the right of slavery in the great American Republic to go where it had not been before, passed eloquent resolutions congratulating the nations of Europe upon the triumphs of freedom achieved by the uprisings of 1848.
The struggle about the admission of slavery in Oregon was still going on, and the more portentous struggle about New Mexico and California was impending, when the two parties held their national conventions to nominate candidates for the presidency. The Democratic Convention met first on May 22 at Baltimore. The first business it had to deal with was a contest of two rival delegations from New York, one representing the “Hunkers,” whose principal chiefs were Marcy, then Secretary of War, and Daniel S. Dickinson, the Senator; and the other the “Barnburners,” who counted among their leading men such Democrats as John A. Dix and Preston King, with Martin Van Buren in the background. The State Convention which sent the Hunker delegation had laid on the table a resolution approving the Wilmot Proviso. The Barnburner Convention had declared itself warmly against the admission of slavery in the territories. The Hunkers pledged themselves to support the Democratic nominees,
