Clay, upon his arrival at Washington, found “the feeling for disunion among some intemperate Southern politicians” stronger than he had expected; but he thought the masses were still sound, and he therefore urged his friends in Kentucky to “get up large, powerful meetings of both parties to express in strong language their determination to stand by the Union.” Early in January he wrote that, in case of the adoption of the Wilmot Proviso, for which he thought there was a large majority in the House and a small one in the Senate, the hotspurs of the South declared themselves openly for a dissolution of the Union, and that he was considering “some comprehensive scheme of settling amicably the whole question in all its bearings.” The purpose to attempt a settlement by a plan of his own became confirmed as his anxiety grew lest the disunion sentiment should spread by contagion, and as the bills and propositions brought forward in a disjointed way appeared only still more to increase the prevailing confusion. What happened to him now was what had happened to him so frequently before. Where he was, the minds of his associates seemed to turn instinctively to him for leadership; and the old man who had come to the Senate with the intention of remaining “a calm and quiet looker-on,” and of “rarely speaking,” soon found himself engaged in the most arduous parliamentary campaign of his life, those in Jackson's time not excepted.
Never had there been a Senate with so splendid
