ABSTRACT
In February 1852 a southern Democrat fretted, “The Country was never more unsettled than at present [and] there never was a time when we needed more a firmer and manly president who by a life times service had [so] identified himself with Democratic Principles, that he would not be tempted to do some new or strange things of doubtful propriety to render him popular.” Unhappily, that “firmer and manly president” would be the relatively unknown and largely feckless Franklin Pierce. Yet less important than this Democrat’s dashed hopes for the future was his sense of the unsettled state of politics on the eve of the 1852 presidential campaign. To many observers then and now, the Compromise of 1850 seemed to leave extremists North and South little on which to focus their anti- and pro-slavery agitation. California’s admission to the Union was a fact. The principle of nonintervention with slavery in the territories of the Mexican Cession had for the moment blunted the growing sectional hostility that issued from the debate over Wilmot’s restrictionist “Proviso.” Moreover, New Mexico and Utah were far removed from the capital, and though theoretically open to slavery, the 1860 census would report no slaves in New Mexico and but a handful in Utah. Only the Fugitive Slave Act aroused hostility.
