The shock was aggravated by the fact that
New Mexico, actually instigated thereto by the slaveholding President
Taylor himself, was likely to follow close in the Californian
foot-tracks. The admission of Texas had for a moment disturbed the
senatorial equilibrium between North and South, which, however, had
quickly been restored by the admission of Wisconsin. But the South had
nothing to offer to counterbalance California and New Mexico, which were
being suddenly filched from her confident expectation. In this emergency
those extremists in the South who offset the Abolitionists at the North
fell back upon the appalling threat of disunion, which could hardly be
regarded as an idle extravagance of the "hotspurs," since it was
substantially certain that the Senate would never admit California with
her anti-slavery Constitution; and thus a real crisis seemed at hand.
Other questions also were cast into the seething caldron. Texas, whose
boundaries were as uncertain as the ethics of politicians, set up a
claim which included nearly all New Mexico, and so would have settled
the question of slavery for that region at least. Further, the South
called for a Fugitive Slave Law sufficiently stringent to be
serviceable. Also, in encountering the Wilmot proviso, Southern
statesmen had asserted the doctrine, far-reaching and subversive of
established ideas and of enacted laws, that Congress could not
constitutionally interfere with the property-rights of citizens of the
United States in the Territories, and that slaves were property.
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