Elias Nason, The Life and Times of Charles Sumner: His Boyhood, Education and Public Career.

By the treaty of peace with Mexico, proclaimed July 4, 1848, that vast extent of territory north of the Rio Grande, together with New Mexico and California, embracing more than 500,000 square miles, was relinquished to the United States; and over these immense regions the slave propagandists sought to extend their abominable system. The stake in the political game between them and the friends of freedom was a virgin territory more than four times as large as the British Isles, and more than twice as large as France and Switzerland. Shall it be opened to free or servile labor? Shall peace and plenty, or bondage and poverty, reign therein? Life or death?--this was the commanding question of the day. The new organization saw the magnitude of the issue, and said, “Life!” The old party, bending to the arrogant dictation of the South, said, “Death!” Daniel Webster doubtless drank his brandy with his eye turned toward the North, then towards the South, then towards the White House, and said, “Death!” And this was his finality!

Although hard names, forbidding frowns, and gibe and jest and social ostracism, were to be accepted by the men who dared to leave the dominant