%375. State of Feeling in the South.%--Southern men, both Whigs and Democrats, were convinced that an attempt would be made by Northern and Western men opposed to the extension of slavery to keep the new territory free soil. Efforts were at once made to prevent this. At a meeting of Southern members of Congress, an address written by Calhoun was adopted and signed, and published all over the country. It 1. Complained of the difficulty of capturing slaves when they escaped to the free states. 2. Complained of the constant agitation of the slavery question by the abolitionists. 3. And demanded that the territories should be open to slavery. A little later, in 1849, the legislature of Virginia adopted resolutions setting forth: 1. That "the attempt to enforce the Wilmot Proviso" would rouse the people of Virginia to "determined resistance at all hazards and to the last extremity." 2. That the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia would be a direct attack on the institutions of the Southern States. The Missouri legislature protested against the principle of the Wilmot Proviso, and instructed her senators and representatives to vote with the slaveholding states. The Tennessee Democratic State Central Committee, in an address, declared that the encroachments of their Northern brethren had reached a point where forbearance ceased to be a virtue. At a dinner to Senator Butler, in South Carolina, one of the toasts was "A Southern Confederacy." %376. State of Feeling in the North.%--Feeling in the free states ran quite as high. 1. The legislatures of every one of them, except Iowa,[1] resolved that Congress had power and was in duty bound to prohibit slavery in the territories. [Footnote 1: Iowa had been admitted December 28, 1846.] 2. Many of them bade their congressmen do everything possible to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The struggle thus coming to an issue in the summer of 1849 was precipitated by a most unlooked-for discovery in California, which led the people of that region to take matters into their own hands. %377. Discovery of Gold in California.%--One day in the month of January, 1848, while a man named Marshall was constructing a mill race in the valley of the American River in California, for a Swiss immigrant named Sutter, he saw particles of some yellow substance shining in the mud. Picking up a few, he examined them, and thinking they might be gold, he gathered some more and set off for Sutter's Fort, where the city of Sacramento now stands. [Illustration: %Sutter's mill%]