In Mr. Stephens' history of the United States, it is said that in accepting the nomination tendered him by the Whigs, General Scott "cautiously avoided endorsing that portion of the Whig platform which pledged the party to an acceptance of and acquiescence in the measures of 1850." If avoidance there was, it was because he deemed it unnecessary to pledge his faith to measures with which he was so intimately identified. He was acting Secretary of War during the pendency of these measures. "No one," says Mr. Graham in a letter to a friend, "more deeply felt the importance of the crisis, or cooperated with us more efficiently in procuring the passage of the compromise measure, or rejoiced more heartily in the settlement thereby made." With a soldier's sentiment of honor, General Scott rested on his record, which was open to all the world. But the charge of unfaithfulness to those measures was made against him, and urged with fatal effect. And so it came to pass that the two candidates who had exerted all their abilities, and used all their influence, official and other, to secure the passage of the compromise measures, were beaten upon the charge alleged against one of them of unfaithfulness to those measures. After his retirement from the cabinet, and in the same year--1852--he delivered the sixth lecture in the course, before the Historical Society of New York, in Metropolitan Hall, in the city of New York. "The attendance," we are told in the _Evening Post_ of that date, "was exceedingly numerous." Ever anxious to exalt his State, and set her before the world in her true glory, his subject was taken from the history of North Carolina. It was the British invasion of North Carolina in 1780 and 1781.