The fourth era began with the issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation; extended through two years and more of battle by which the proclamation was carried into effect, and slavery was destroyed _de facto_ as it had already been _de jure_, and foreign intervention was prevented; and ended with raising the flag over Sumter, the sign of the restoration of our national authority over a free and undivided national domain. The fifth includes the period of reconstruction, in which the difficult task of bringing the States, once in rebellion but now submissive, back into the Union was successfully accomplished. It covers the ground from the close of the war to the present time, or, more properly, from the death of President Lincoln, when the South lay prostrate at the feet of the victorious North, to the election of President Cleveland, when, as Mr. Beecher hoped and believed, sectional lines were obliterated and the South once more saw the candidate she favored raised to be the chief magistrate of our common country. The Compromise measures of 1850 were conceived for the purpose of removing the serious and dangerous complications that had arisen, between the North and the South, in the attempt to organize the territory recently acquired from Mexico, and in admitting California as a free State with a constitution for ever prohibiting slavery within her borders. The South felt that such an addition to the free States would so disturb the balance of power between the sections that something must be given her as a compensation. Hence these Compromise measures, which provided for the admission of California as a free State, but gave the South, as an offset, a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law and paid Texas ten millions of dollars for the adjustment of her State boundaries. Honestly intended, no doubt, and urged by the mover, Henry Clay, and accepted by many who disliked it, from patriotic motives, this Compromise was, nevertheless, wrong in principle and proved only mischievous in results. It rested on the false theory that the development of both liberty and slavery was equally the duty of the Republic, and that whatever gain was made by the former must be equalized to the latter by some new concession, and led to constantly increasing disturbance in both sections. While failing to satisfy the more radical men of the South, it was utterly abhorrent to a much larger body at the North. It seemed to the latter to be but another great step taken by the slave-power in its attempt to gain possession of the whole land. The first had been the Missouri Compromise, in which slavery, surrendering what it never owned—viz., the territory north of 36° 30′, called Mason and Dixon’s line—gained Missouri and a _quasi_ right to all territory south of that line. In this second great step now proposed they did not fail to note that the provision to prohibit slavery in the newly-acquired territories, called the “Wilmot Proviso,” had been