These discussions, however, had created a deep feeling throughout the Northern States. Meetings were held in all the large cities. There was every promise that the ensuing Congress would decide the Missouri question adverse to the views of the South. Nor do we think that this result would have failed to occur, except for the fact that the new State of Maine also presented itself to the sixteenth Congress as a candidate for admission into the Union. An effort was made in the House to delay action on this bill, until the Missouri bill came but it failed, and the Maine bill was passed. When it reached the Senate, a clause for the admission of Missouri was added to it. The whole subject was discussed on this amendment. It prevailed by a vote of 23 to 21. Thomas, of Illinois, then proposed what was afterwards known as the compromise clause. The majority, both of Northern and Southern senators, supported this amendment. The bill then passed, 24 to 20; the slave-holding States, with Delaware and Illinois, voting for it, and all the remaining free States against it.

When this bill was returned to the House, the amendments of the Senate were disagreed to. Thomas's compromise was defeated by a vote of 159 to 18. Of these eighteen, ten were from the North and eight from the South. A committee of conference was agreed to; and Clay, then speaker, appointed a majority in favor of a compromise. In the meantime, the House passed the Missouri bill, with the prohibition clause attached. The Senate sent this bill back, with the prohibition clause stricken out, and Thomas's proviso inserted. The movement for a compromise was on foot. The amendment of the Senate, striking out the prohibition in the Missouri bill, was concurred in by a vote of 90 to 87; and the Thomas proviso was agreed to be inserted, by a vote of 134 to 42; thirty-five Southern members voting in the negative, on the ground that the proviso was not in the power of Congress. The Senate receded from its amendment to the Maine bill,which provided for the admission of Missouri, and the bills were sent to the President. It is known that they became laws.

How, we ask, can it be said by any one as familiar as Mr. Benton undoubtedly is with the history of our National Legislation, that the Missouri Compromise was the work of the South, and that it divided the territory more favorably to the North than the ordinance of 1787? It can only mean that it is a Southern measure in the sense that it spared something of the rights of the South. There might be great force in the argument that the South should preserve it intact, if the statement that it was a Southern measure were historically true. For, if the South could have bound itself to divide the territory belonging to the confederacy, in such manner that slavery could be legalized in one portion, and had proposed such an arrangement, it might have deserved the covert censure of the author's view. But when the South was obliged to give up, on the part of its citizens, the right which before existed in them, to take their slave property into all the territories of the United States, in order that a people holding slaves, who were entitled to enter into the Union as a separate community, might enjoy their plain right to hold their private property undisturbed by law; it is saying much to call the sacrifices which they were constrained to make, a measure of their own. Nor are we hindered in our free criticisms upon the author's opinions, by the statements made more at large in the second chapter relating to Monroe's administration. The names of the supporters of the Missouri Compromise cannot be quoted to uphold its "constitutionality and binding force," as he has phrased it. Whether constitutional or not, it was, as shown by Mr. Cass in his able speech in the Senate, on January 21st and 22d, 1850, to be a method of legislation highly inexpedient; and it possessed no other binding force, than any provision made by Congress for the government of the territories of the United States.

We pass, without comment, over many of the succeeding chapters relating to Monroe's administration. The reader will derive much instruction from the greater number. The chapters upon the "Oregon Territory," "the Florida Treaty,

and cession of Texas," are very interesting; and the notices of the public services and death of Lowndes and William Pinckney, of Maryland, are graceful and deserved tributes to the memories of two great men. The chapter on Internal Improvements is principally an analysis of the argument of President Monroe, upon the bill for the preservation and repair of the Cumberland road; which is fitly characterized by the author as one of the greatest state papers ever prepared by a President. The visit of Lafayette to the United States is agreeably related; and the substance of the argument upon the revision of the tariff in the session of 1823-4, is given. The A. B. plat is resuscitated from the oblivion into which it might very properly have been suffered to pass; and the chapter terminates with what is, we think, a needless implication. After stating that William H. Crawford, the Secretary of the Treasury, had been fully acquitted of the charges made against him by Ninian Edwards, formerly Senator from Illinois, Mr. Benton says that Mr. Calhoun was seriously injured by the transaction, because the newspaper in which these charges appeared, was edited by a war-office clerk in the interest" of Mr. Calhoun. There is a covert imputation in this closing paragraph, which no statement made by the author even is found to justify, and which, we think, his respect for his contemporary might have caused him to omit.

Many parts of the history of the administration of John Quincy Adams are interesting. The account of the once famous Panama mission; the personal details of the duel between Clay and Randolph; the sketch of John Gaillard, of South Carolina, so long President of the Senate, in consequence of the death, of Clinton and Gerry and the protracted absence of Tompkins, will all well repay perusal. The chapter containing the political history of the revision of the tariff, in 1828, is also instructive. The 38th chapter presents a curious instance of the bent of the author's mind, showing something of that Quixotic disposition to obtain an adversary, of which he has been repeatedly charged. After reciting the

election of General Jackson to the Presidency, he finds it to be his duty to combat an erroneous theory, set up by De Tocqueville, as to the reason of the success of that great leader. We do not think that the casual opinions of De Tocqueville, upon a question which he was in no position to estimate properly, required the elaborate condemnation which the author has bestowed upon them. The chapter succeeding is devoted to a duty far more agreeable to the general reader : a notice of the life of Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, a man of such purity and elevation of character, that history is ennobled by the record of his life.

In 1829, General Jackson entered upon the Presidential office. The details of his administration passed more immediately under the view of the author, and were considered with a riper experience and judgment. Indeed, to our mind, it is from this point that a deeper interest in his narrative commences. The curtain is raised upon some of those arcana into which the public rarely penetrates. The alleged effort of Duff Green to defeat the re-election of General Jackson, and his attempt to obtain the assistance of Mr. Duncanson, constitute an extraordinary chapter. We, certainly, do not undertake to clear Duff Green's skirts of the contrivance which the author would attach to them, but we must doubt that General Jackson sent for Francis P. Blair, with any anticipation of the rupture likely to occur between himself and the friends of Mr. Calhoun. It is a sufficient reason, to our mind, that Duff Green had ceased to possess his full friendship; and that he preferred to obtain, for his administration, the assistance of some other person, who could act as occasion required, in the conduct of a leading political journal. Indeed, we are obliged to say that many sentences, in this part of Benton's work, indicate a deep-seated hostility towards Mr. Calhoun, the impression of which is not erased by an occasional compliment to his great intellectual qualities. In the forty-sixth chapter, Mr. Calhoun is even made responsible for the abandonment of the celebration, at Washington, of Jefferson's birth-day. The reader will be at a loss, after

reading the account of the dinner, from which this neglect dated, to understand Calhoun's connection with the result. It was in 1830 that the nullification troubles were coming to a head. General Jackson, when called on for a toast, gave one, which has become historical,-"Our federal Union: it must be preserved." Mr. Calhoun gave the next toast: The Union, next to our liberty, the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefit and burthen of the Union." Now it is certainly true that these several toasts represented, on the one part, the opinions and strong purpose of General Jackson, and, on the other, the views and political sentiments of Mr. Calhoun. We can see no objection to the one, or to the other; nor does either interfere with a just admiration of the beauty of the "proud peroration of Mr. Webster," which had deservedly excited the admiration of all listeners to his recent speech in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Webster could not and would not have disputed the valid inferences to be derived from the sentiments Mr. Calhoun had expressed. It may be, that the times gave peculiar significance to the words of General Jackson, and to the qualifications imposed upon his views by the remarks of Calhoun; but it would cost some effort, we think, to find in either sentiment a proper cause for charging upon Mr. Calhoun the responsibility of terminating the annual festivities in commemoration of the birth-day of Jefferson.

This indisposition, if we may call it by no other name, towards Mr. Calhoun, appears more plainly in the fifty-third chapter. This relates to the former quarrel between Jackson and Calhoun, with regard to the alleged course of the latter towards the former during the Seminole war. It is known to the reader that Calhoun, in 1831, issued a pamphlet, explaining the cause of this difference. The candid reader will not discover, in this address, any thing that impugns the honor of General Jackson. Mr. Calhoun attributed the rupture to the intrigues of others, and in this opinion the world