Clure's vision reaches. Wilmot's public utterances and private correspondence, from the moment of his first participation in national affairs, breathe the spirit of the zealot in the cause of resistance to the extension of slavery, but never of what McClure elsewhere calls the "speculative politician," moving the pieces in a game for personal or factional power. His mind can best be revealed in his own words, taken from a letter to Hon. Ulysses Mercur," written in the midst of the strife resulting from the introduction of the Proviso and when political crucifixion menaced its sponsor:

I think I understand what constitutes democracy. That party exists by virtue of its principles. It is principle, and that alone, which separates it from other parties. The mere machinery of parties is the same; it is principle that gives them character and stability. My principles are a part of me, and will not be abandoned or compromised, nor shall I do anything to bring reproach upon them or dishonor upon myself. If a faithful and honest support of democratic principles will secure me a place in the party, I shall ever be found there. I will also cheerfully stand. by any organization established for the advancement of those principles; but if this is not enough, if it be further required that I shall submit in humble and slavish acquiescence to an organization based upon and intended to promote the one object of slavery extension, then set me aside at once. I will never sustain any such organization, but will do all in my power to break it down.

The essential language of the Proviso, it may be repeated (Wilmot himself emphasized it), was Jefferson's—unless, indeed, Jefferson borrowed from a still earlier text. It is not important who adapted the phraseology to the particular situation facing the House, in August, 1846. To lay great stress upon the wording shows a failure to understand the real significance of the movement. That wording was repeatedly altered in later submissions of the amendment, and all but the original Jeffersonian text was ultimately discarded. It was

24 Dated Washington, February 7, 1850.

purpose, and determination in pursuing that purpose, that counted. As the protagonist of the idea underlying all the verbal forms, from the time of the Two Million Bill onward, Wilmot took and held a position that was unique.

There are several indications that, realizing his inexperience in the strategy and tactics of parliamentary contests, and fearing not the muzzle of the Speaker but the cunning of older fighters among the opposition, he sought and received advice and assistance on the floor of the House from more practiced associates-Preston King, of New York, in a case already cited; Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, on another occasion. Some writers, unfamiliar with what had gone before in Wilmot's solitary opening of the battle, have put an exaggerated emphasis on the parts played by these coöperators. Many men loomed larger in the public eye in the later years of the free-soil campaigns and the at last triumphant republican party of 1860, though, according to Lossing, both free-soilism and republicanism were based solidly on the Wilmot Proviso. But no one who reads the political history of that period; who follows the men of that time through their correspondence, their campaigns and their work at home and in Washington; who applies King Solomon's test, to see who has the greatest love for the child-can believe for a moment that any other than David Wilmot was the real parent, as he was the undoubted prophet, of the Proviso.

CHAPTER X

SECOND CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN

IF David Wilmot had been actuated by political ambition, as a casual commentator once said, he would never have busied himself with the framing and the proposal of any such legislation as the Proviso. He would have utterly avoided even the modest office ascribed to him by another writer-that of assuming responsibility for a measure which it was felt would be most unpalatable to the South. Success, patronage and power were to be gained by going in exactly the opposite direction. His experience, short as it was, had showed him that. Polk's own testimony is witness to the progress the congressman from the twelfth Pennsylvania district was making in the Executive's notice and favor. December 21, 1845, he set down with evident satisfaction that:

Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania expressed his approval of the whole message & added, the doctrines on the tariff were the true doctrines & he would support them.1

July 3, 1846, after the passage of the tariff bill which Wilmot aided by his speech and vote, Polk added:

I was much gratified to hear the result, as this was one of the leading and vital measures of my administration. It was in truth really the most important domestic measure of my administration.*

April 20, 1846, also, he thought Wilmot's agreement with him in the matter of the Oregon notice worthy of record, by the comment:

I would have preferred a naked notice; next to that I preferred the House Resolutions; but it being now ascertained by repeated

1 Diary of James K. Polk, edited by M. M. Quaife (Chicago Historical Society), Vol. I, p. 110.

2 Diary, Vol. II, p. 11.

votes that neither could be had, I decidedly prefer the Senate form to no notice at all.

Mr. Speaker Davis, for whom I had sent, called. He agreed also in these opinions, as did also Mr. Wilmot & Mr. Foster of Pennsylvania, who called in the course of the evening."

And there is the suggestion of a growing rapport between the President and the congressman in the entry of December 30, 1846:

After night the Hon. Mr. Wilmot called & held a long conversation with me on public subjects.*

The break came when Wilmot, finding that he could not follow both the President and his own principles, chose the latter, and with them the consequences of crossing the purposes of the Administration, and of the greater and more lasting powers that lay behind that Administration. Polk sets down at length what was apparently their principal conversation on that subject, December 23, 1846:

After night Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania called, and shortly afterwards Mr. C. J. Ingersoll came in. Mr. Wilmot called by appointment, but the presence of Mr. Ingersoll prevented me from having as full a conversation with him as I desired. I did, however, hold a conversation with him on the subject of slavery restriction, which had been attached upon his motion at the last session of Congress to the Bill which proposed to appropriate two millions of dollars, with a view to enable the Executive to make a Treaty with Mexico. He expressed an entire willingness to vote for the appropriation without the restriction, and said he would not again move the restriction, but that if it was moved by others, he would feel constrained to vote for it. I told him I did not desire to extend slavery, that I would be satisfied to acquire by Treaty from Mexico the provinces of New Mexico & the Californias, and that in these provinces slavery could probably never exist, and the great probability was that the question would never arise in the

8 Diary, Vol. I, p. 342.

Diary, Vol. II, p. 299.

future organization of territorial or State governments in these territories. I told him that slavery was purely a domestic question, and to restrict the appropriation which had been asked for so as to require the President to insert it in a Treaty with a Foreign Power, was not only inappropriate and out of place, but that if such a Treaty were made it must be opposed by every Senator from a slaveholding State, and as one third of the Senators could reject a treaty, it could not be ratified, though it might be satisfactory in all other respects. I told him that trammeled with such a restriction I could not use the appropriation at all and would not do so. He said he would be satisfied with a simple legislative declaration in the Bill of the sense of Congress, without requiring it to be inserted in the Treaty, or, if it was not moved by others, he would be willing to vote for the appropriation without the restriction in any form."

This was, of course, the same conference which Wilmot described later in the House of Representatives, during the second session of the Thirtieth Congress, and it is interesting to see how two men, agreeing closely on almost the entire conversation, carried away entirely different conceptions of its import. Polk's mind seized and magnified Wilmot's apparent willingness to vote for a bill making the desired appropriation without attaching the Proviso. Wilmot's mind was occupied with the (to him essential) complementary proposition that the principle of the Proviso should find "legislative expression" in some other way, but at the same time. He says he suggested a joint resolution, and the President replied: “Mr. Wilmot, bring it in that way." He even undertook, he continues, to draft such a resolution; and then members of larger legislative experience explained to him that such a resolution was utterly impracticable; and between the lines of the explanation the reader seems to detect at least a suspicion that the President had played rather too sharp a game and nearly led him into a parliamentary pitfall.

Diary, Vol. II, pp. 288-290. Polk seems to have been setting up a man of straw. There was no proposal to insert the restriction in the treaty, nor to require the President to do so.