Whatever theoretic or practical objections may be justly made to the compromise of 1850, there can be no doubt that it was accepted and ratified by a great majority of the American people, whether in the North or in the South. They were intent on business--then remarkably prosperous--on planting, building, trading and getting gain--and they hailed with general joy the announcement that all the differences between the diverse "sections" had been adjusted and settled. The terms of settlement were, to that majority, of quite subordinate consequence; they wanted peace and prosperity, and were no wise inclined to cut each other's throats and burn each other's houses in a quarrel concerning (as they regarded it) only the _status_ of negroes. The compromise had taken no money from their pockets; it had imposed upon them no pecuniary burdens; it had exposed them to no personal and palpable dangers; it had rather repelled the gaunt spectre of civil war and disunion (habitually conjured up when slavery had a point to carry), and increased the facilities for making money, while opening a boundless vista of national greatness, security and internal harmony. Especially by the trading class, and the great majority of the dwellers in seaboard cities, was this view cherished with intense, intolerant vehemence.... Whatever else the election of 1852 might have meant, there was no doubt that the popular verdict was against "slavery agitation" and in favor of maintaining the compromises of 1850.... The finances were healthy and the public credit unimpaired. Industry and trade were signally prosperous. The tariff had ceased to be a theme of partisan or sectional strife. The immense yield of gold in California during the four preceding years had stimulated enterprise and quickened the energies of labor, and its volume as yet showed no signs of diminution. And though the Fugitive Slave law was still denounced, and occasionally resisted by abolitionists in the free States, while disunionists still plotted in secret and more openly prepared in Southern commercial conventions (having for their ostensible object the establishment of a general exchange of the great Southern staples directly from their own harbors with the principal European marts, instead of circuitously by way of New York and other Northern Atlantic ports) there was still a goodly majority in the South, with a still larger in the North and Northwest, in favor of maintaining the Union and preserving the greatest practical measure of cordiality and fraternity between the free and slave States, substantially on the basis of the compromise of 1850.