an array of talent, and so great a number of names that were then, or were destined to become, famous throughout the land. The three stars of the first magnitude, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, met once more, and for the last time, on the same theatre of action, and around them Benton, Mangum, Badger, Berrien, Sam Houston, Rusk, King of Alabama, Jefferson Davis, Henry S. Foote, Cass, Butler of South Carolina, Hunter and Mason of Virginia, Daniel S. Dickinson, Stephen A. Douglas, Pierre Soulé, Jesse D. Bright, John Davis of Massachusetts, Thomas Corwin, Hannibal Hamlin, Truman Smith, John P. Hale, and two men who owed their election to the campaign of 1848, — William H. Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, who grasped the slavery question, in all its moral, social, and political aspects, with a breadth of understanding, and treated it with an enthusiastic but calm fearlessness of spirit, startling and puzzling the old statesmen before them. It was the anti-slavery statesmanship of the rising generation.
To this Senate Clay, on January 29, 1850, unfolded his “comprehensive scheme of adjustment.” His object was to save the Union, and he reasoned thus: The Union is threatened by the disunion spirit growing up in the South. That disunion spirit springs from an apprehension that slavery is not safe in the Union. The disunion spirit must be disarmed by concessions calculated to quiet that apprehension. These concessions must be such as
