defeated in Congress, nor fail to see that in these Compromise measures, should they be carried, the slave-power would secure the right to hunt and capture its fugitives in every city, town, and home of the free States, and to compel every Northern citizen to aid in the work, thus making, so far as fugitives were concerned, slave territory of the whole North. They saw in this measure a great advance towards nationalizing this institution and securing for it the right, aimed at by its advocates from the first, to go unquestioned and protected wherever the authority of the Constitution of the United States was recognized. If this were passed they felt it to be not at all improbable that the threat of Senator Toombs, of Georgia, to call the roll of his slaves from the steps of Bunker Hill Monument, would be executed, and they opposed it with an energy born both of conviction and abhorrence. In this opposition none were more strenuous than Mr. Beecher. Speaking of this period, he says: “In 1850, when the controversy came up about Clay’s Omnibus Bill, including the Fugitive Slave Laws, I was thoroughly roused, and in the pulpit and with my pen I attacked with the utmost earnestness the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. It was then that I wrote that article, ‘Shall we Compromise?’ It was read to John C. Calhoun on his sick-bed by his clerk, and he raised himself up and said: ‘Read that article again.’ The article was read. ‘The man who says that is right. There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery.’ And then, when Webster made his fatal apostasy on March 7, 1850, I joined with all Northern men of any freedom-loving spirit in denouncing it and in denouncing him. Forthwith, after a paralysis of a few weeks, his friends determined to save him by getting all the old clergymen—such men as Dr. Spring, Dr. Lord of Dartmouth, and the Andover professors—to take his part. The effort was to get every great and influential man in the North to stand up for Webster; and then it was that I flamed. They failed utterly. Professor Woolsey of New Haven, Dr. Bacon, Dr. Hopkins, President of Williams College in Massachusetts, and various other most influential men, absolutely refused to sustain Webster.” In the issue of the _Independent_ of February 21, 1850, filling three columns, we have the famous article referred to above. We quote only enough to indicate its spirit and line of argument:[5] ----- Footnote 5: This article entire can be found in Mr. Beecher’s “Patriotic Addresses,” published by Fords, Howard & Hulbert, New York City. ----- “SHALL WE COMPROMISE? “Mr. Clay’s Compromise has been violently resisted by the South and but coldly looked upon by the North.