The denial of the equal rights of the Southern States in the public territorial domain, and the nullification by the Northern States of the acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court on territorial questions, and the formation and triumph of a party pledged to hostility to the South, were not the only considerations that convinced the Southern States that their only honorable course lay in secession. The compact of the written Constitution was the only Union that had existed. A breach or repudiation of that compact was a breach of the Union. It was secession without its name. In 1850, after a violent sectional agitation, which shook the country, over the admission of California as a free State, a compromise measure, proposed by Mr. Clay and advocated by Webster and Calhoun, was adopted by Congress. It was known as the "omnibus bill." It provided, among other things, that California should be a free State; that the slave trade should be abolished in the District of Columbia, and that slaves escaping from their owners, from one State into another, could be arrested anywhere and returned to their owners. Article four, section two of the Federal Constitution makes this provision in the plainest of terms. It was similar to the New England Fugitive Slave law of 1643 enacted by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth and New Haven. Mr. Webster in his great speech in Faneuil Hall in Boston, in defense of his vote for the "omnibus bill," read the words of the Constitution and showed that the fugitive slave section of the omnibus bill was almost a literal reiteration of the constitutional provision. The majority of the Northern States repudiated this feature of the act of Congress and declared that it should not be enforced. Here was the boldest nullification, the most direct breaking up of the old Union. Here was the arch rebellion of the century. The question was not what should be done with the fugitive slaves, but whether the Northern States would do what, in the Constitution, they had agreed to do. The South waited for the Northern States to revoke such a flagrant disregard of their rights under the Constitution and such a bold repudiation of the original terms of Union. Patriotic little Rhode Island did rescind her action in the matter, but she was alone. Most of the other States had become desperate in their hostility to the South and, when the South, seeing all hope of justice, all vestige of the old Union, all prospect of peace, hopelessly gone, resorted to quiet, peaceable withdrawal from these domineering States, the resolution was formed and carried out by the party in power, to subjugate the Southern States to the will of the majority States, and keep them in what was called the Union against their will.