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402 Organisation of California. Slavery in the House. [i840 Wilmot Proviso "would rouse the people of Virginia to determined resistance at all hazards and to the last extremity." Missouri also protested against the principle of proviso. In the Free States feeling ran quite as high. The legislatures of all save Iowa resolved that Congress was in duty bound to prohibit slavery in the Territories ; and many of them instructed their members in Congress to strive for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia. Attempts to accomplish this end were made and failed, as did every proposal to establish governments in the Territories ; and the Thirtieth Congress closed without settling the question. When the news that Congress had not provided a government for California reached the people of that country, they proceeded to establish one of their own making. Men from every part of the world were hurrying to the goldfields ; villages and mining camps were springing up by hundreds ; an extensive commerce already existed with Mexico, Chili, and Australia ; and no legal provisions adequate to the emergency were in force. Fully comprehending the needs of the hour, General Riley, the military governor, who was then acting as civil governor, issued in June, 1849, a proclamation calling for the election of delegates to a convention in order to frame a State constitution. The convention, thus sanctioned, assembled at Monterey in September, and drew up a Free-State con- stitution which the people ratified. State officers, a legislature, repre- sentatives to Congress, and Senators, were then elected; and, when Congress met, application was formally made for the admission of California into the Union as a State. The first duty of the new House of Representatives, when the members assembled in December, 1849, was the election of a Speaker. But slavery had by this time become a part of every political issue, and nearly three weeks passed before the final ballot was taken and a presiding officer chosen. By no one was this scene of sectional strife witnessed with deeper concern than by Henry Clay. After an absence of nearly eight years he had been persuaded to return to the Senate, and had come to Washington fully determined, he said, to take no leading part. But he had not been many days in Washington before he was convinced that the threats of disunion were serious, that the Union was really in danger, and that the secessionist spirit arose from the fear that the institution of slavery was no longer safe. To quiet this fear and subdue the spirit of disunion, concessions, he held, must be made by both sides. The time, in short, had come for another compromise ; and towards the accomplishment of this great end Clay now bent all his energies. The obstacles to be overcome were five in number. (1) The South resisted the admission of California as a Free State, because it would upset the balance of power between the Free and Slave States in the Senate by making sixteen free-soil States to fifteen slave-holding. (2) The Mor- mons, when driven from Illinois in 1846, went to Mexico and founded