Even a careless eye or ear might have declared both sections, North and South, to have been represented here.

Grave men they were, and accustomed to think, and they reflected, thus early in Millard Fillmore's administration, the evenly balanced political powers of the time.
The headlong haste of both sections was in the year 1850 halted for a time by the sage counsels of such leaders as Clay, in the South, even Webster, in the North.

The South claimed, after the close of the Mexican War and the accession of the enormous Spanish territories to the southwest, that the accepted line of compromise established in 1820, by which slavery might not pass north of the parallel of latitude thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, should be extended westward quite to the Pacific Ocean.

She grumbled that, although she had helped fight for and pay for this territory, she could not control it, and could not move into it legally the slaves which then made the most valued part of a southern man's property.
As against this feeling, the united politicians had thrown to the hot-headed Southerners a sop in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act.
The right for a southern owner to follow and claim his slave in any northern state was granted under the Constitution of the United States.

Under the compromise of 1850, it was extended and confirmed.
The abolitionists of the North rose in arms against this part of the great compromise measure; a law which, though constitutional, seemed to them nefarious and infamous.