Toombs and Stephens, in fact, were warm personal friends of George W. Crawford, who was Secretary of War in Taylor's Cabinet. He had served with them in the General Assembly of Georgia and had twice been Governor of their State. The Golphin claim, of which Governor Crawford had been agent, had been collected from the Secretary of the Treasury while Governor Crawford was in the Cabinet, but President Taylor had decided that as Governor Crawford was at the head of an entirely different department of the government, he had been guilty of no impropriety. After the death of President Taylor, Governor Crawford returned to Augusta and was tendered a public dinner by his fellow-citizens, irrespective of party. He delivered an eloquent and feeling address. He made an extensive tour abroad, then lived in retirement in Richmond County, enjoying the respect and confidence of his neighbors. CHAPTER VI. THE COMPROMISE OF 1850. No legislative body ever assembled with more momentous measures before it than the thirty-first Congress of the United States. An immense area of unsettled public domain had been wrested from Mexico. The Territories of California, Utah, and New Mexico, amounting to several hundred thousand square miles, remained undisposed of. They comprised what Mr. Calhoun had termed the "Forbidden Fruit," and the trouble which beclouded their annexation threatened to surpass the storms of conquest. Congress felt that it was absolutely without light to guide it. It had declined to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. Henry Clay had pronounced such division of public domain between the sections a "Utopian dream," and Zachary Taylor had condemned the principle in the only message he ever delivered to Congress. What Mr. Lincoln afterward embodied in his famous expression that the Union could never exist "half slave, half free," had been actually anticipated. The whole territorial question came up as a new problem. But if the crisis was now momentous the body of statesmen which considered it was a great one. The men and the hour seemed to meet in that supreme moment. The Senate consisted of sixty members, and for the last time that great trio of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster met upon its floor. Commencing their careers a generation before; with eventful lives and illustrious performance, they lingered one moment in this arena before passing forever from the scenes of their earthly efforts. All three had given up ambition for the Presidency, none of them had commenced to break in mental power, and each one was animated by patriotism to serve and save his country. William H. Seward had entered the Senate from New York; James M. Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter represented Virginia; Wm. C. Dawson had joined Mr. Berrien from Georgia; Salmon P. Chase appeared from Ohio; Jefferson Davis and Henry S. Foote illustrated Mississippi; Stephen A. Douglas had been promoted from the House in Illinois, and Samuel Houston was there from Texas.