HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 
CE 
Opening the box containing the runaway negro sent as freight, 
From “The Underground Railroad,” by William Still. 
the slaveholders of the South were, by 1850, losing hundreds of 
their slaves and millions of dollars every year. 
205. The Compromise of 1850.— At the beginning of Taylor’s 
administration, then, the South and the North were already 
zonsiderably excited over the subject of slavery. When Con- 
gress met in 1849, the question of admitting California came up 
and at once gave rise to a bitter quarrel between the two sections. 
The quarrel had really begun several years before. In 1846, 
when a bill was on its passage through Congress giving money to 
Polk to aid him in acquiring New Mexico and California, David 
Wilmot, a member of the House, offered an amendment to the 
5ill providing that slavery should be forever prohibited in the 
:erritory that might be acquired from Mexico. This amendment, 
known as the Wilmot Proviso, caused more trouble, perhaps, 
than any other measure ever proposed by an American states- 
man, for it woke up the question which since the days of the 
Missouri Compromise (p. 223) had been allowed to slumber, 
the question of the extension of slavery. The Proviso was de- 
feated in 1846, but it came up before Congress again and again. 
It came up in 1849, when California applied for admission,