through the measures of 1850, and all the national unity which it was designed to produce, became of no consideration in the minds of many who constituted the centers of ceaseless hostility. These centers of agitation were not like circles of waves growing wider but weaker from the axis of expansion, but they were veritable storm centers, breeders of agitations which grew in in tensity as they enlarged their spheres of activity. All respect for the "settlement went down as this new agitation of 1852 progressed, and, while the aggression did not gain strength soon enough to defeat Pierce, it entered among the broken hosts of the Whigs and the discordant ranks of the Democrats with force sufficient to inaugurate with new combinations another and a fatal era of the irrepressible conflict.
Under this state of feeling produced by the agitations immediately following the passage of the compromise measures, and intensified by the mortifications incurred in the campaign of 1852, the administration of Fillmore closed and that of Pierce began. The year 1853 has been likened to the era of good feeling during the first years of Monroe s presidency. But the likeness was not real. Monroe could say of the people of the United States: "We are all Democrats! We are all Republicans!" Of the people of the same country in 1853 no such words of praiseworthy unity could be spoken. The country at large was participating in a great degree of material prosperity. The South was enjoying the repose which followed the political victories in 1851 and 1852 of the Constitutional Union party over the alarmed Southerners who had formed the Southern Rights party. Whigs and Democrats in Southern States had coalesced into one party whose cohesive principle for the time being was acquiescence in and maintenance of the settlement of 1850. That one political feature swept into power and office in the South a controlling body of men devoted to the Union and determined to check all move-
