of the South. He roundly berated the Southerners who were not satisfied with the adjustment, and denounced the meeting at Nashville as a second Hartford Convention.
He was not without great anxiety. When the thirty-first Congress reassembled in December, 1850, he availed himself of the earliest opportunity confidently to affirm that general peace and quiet reigned throughout the land, and that this session would remain undisturbed by the slavery question. But in January, 1851, he and forty-four other Senators and Representatives betrayed their nervousness by issuing a very singular manifesto. They declared that sectional controversy upon the subject of slavery could be avoided only by strict adherence to the compromise; that they intended to maintain that settlement inviolate, and that they would not support for the office of President or Vice-President, or Senator or Representative in Congress, or member of a state legislature, any man, of whatever party, who was not known to be opposed to any disturbance of the compromise, and to the renewal of the agitation of the slavery question. Those who thought such a threat of excommunication necessary could not have been very confident that the public opinion of the country would remain strong enough in favor of the compromise to restrain ambitious politicians from interfering with it.
Indeed, the slavery discussion began again in the House of Representatives with the opening of
