The cooler and matured judgments of men who knew Webster personally--Foote, Stephens, Wilson, Seward, and Whittier, in the last century; Hoar, Hale, Fisher, Hosmer, and Wheeler in recent years-modify their partizan political judgments of 1850. The new printed evidence is confirmed by manuscript material: 2,500 letters of the Greenough Collection available since the publication of the recent editions of Webster's letters and apparently unused by Webster's biographers; and Hundreds of still inedited Webster Papers in the New Hampshire Historical Society, and scattered in minor collections. [2] This mass of new material makes possible and desirable a re-examination of the evidence as to (1) the danger from the secession movement in 1850; (2) Webster's change in attitude toward the disunion danger in February, 1850; (3) the purpose and character of his 7th of March speech; (4) the effects of his speech and attitude upon the secession movement. I. During the session of Congress of 1849-1850, the peace of the Union was threatened by problems centering around slavery and the territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War: California's demand for admission with a constitution prohibiting slavery; the Wilmot Proviso excluding slavery from the rest of the Mexican acquisitions (Utah and New Mexico); the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico; the abolition of slave trade in the District of Columbia; and an effective fugitive slave law to replace that of 1793. The evidence for the steadily growing danger of secession until March, 1850, is no longer to be sought in Congressional speeches, but rather in the private letters of those men, Northern and Southern, who were the shrewdest political advisers of the South, and in the official acts of representative bodies of Southerners in local or state meetings, state legislatures, and the Nashville Convention. Even after the compromise was accepted in the South and the secessionists defeated in 1850-1851, the Southern states generally adopted the Georgia platform or its equivalent declaring that the Wilmot Proviso or the repeal of the fugitive-slave law would lead the South to "resist even (as a last resort) to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the Union". Southern disunion sentiment was not sporadic or a party matter; it was endemic.