In the West the crisis did not seem so acute. But Clay, now seventy-four years old, and cured of his ambition to be President, was sent back to the Senate in the hope of averting the calamity of a disruption of the Union. Thomas H. Benton, though recently defeated in a campaign for reelection, was still in the Senate. Cass was again a member of the Senate, and he, too, felt that the Union was about to be dissolved. Douglas and the other younger representatives of the Northwest, who had suffered somewhat from the legislation of 1846, ceased to nurse their grievances against the party, and deplored the "treason" of the abolitionists who were making all the trouble. There was undoubtedly a crisis which Southern leaders like Davis, Stephens, Yancey, and Robert Toombs, another able Georgian who now came into national prominence, took pains to lay to the charge of the radical anti-slavery people of the East; that is, to Seward and his followers, who were allowing Garrison and Phillips and the radical abolitionists to drive them into open opposition to the South. When Clay came back to Washington, Taylor and his Cabinet had taken their stand, which was to recommend the admission of California as a free State. The Mormons in Deseret and a few Americans and Mexicans in New Mexico had taken steps toward organizing Territories in the region between Texas and eastern California, and they were to be made Territories with or without slavery, as they chose. If all this were done, the South would secede and the Administration would be in a dilemma. Taylor was a stubborn man; he had made up his mind, and he sent to Congress a fatherly message in which his devotion to the Union above everything else was very evident. If the Southerners, who were then offering Texas military assistance to make good her claim to a large part of New Mexico, chose to resist the lawful authority of the Administration and war came, the fault would be theirs, not his. But Henry Clay and Daniel Webster still enjoyed much more of the confidence of the people of the country, North and South, than the President. Nor was Webster less popular because he had been ignored by the Administration. He was in his place in the Senate. Calhoun was also there. It was an exceedingly able Congress, that to which Taylor and Seward must look for support. With scant courtesy to the President, Clay took the lead in the Senate late in January and offered his plan of compromising the sectional quarrel. He would make a free State of California, allow Utah, as Deseret came to be called, and New Mexico to form Territorial Governments without mention of slavery, pay Texas ten million dollars for her claims against New Mexico, abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and enact a Fugitive Slave Law which would satisfy the border Southern States.