the passage of Clay's Compromise measures of 1850.

Yet still the Southern Conspirators--whose forces, both in Congress and
out, were now well-disciplined, compacted, solidified, experienced, and
bigotedly enthusiastic and overbearing--were not satisfied. It was not
their intention to be satisfied with anything less than the destruction
of the Union and of our Republican form of Government. The trouble was
only beginning, and, so far, almost everything had progressed to their
liking. The work must proceed.

In 1852-3 they commenced the Kansas-Nebraska agitation; and, what with
their incessant political and colonizing movements in those Territories;
the frequent and dreadful atrocities committed by their tools, the
Border-ruffians; the incessant turmoil created by cruelties to their
Fugitive-slaves; their persistent efforts to change the Supreme Court to
their notions; these-with the decision and opinion of the Supreme Court
in the Dred Scott case--together worked the Slavery question up to a
dangerous degree of heat, by the year 1858.

And, by 1860--when the people of the Free States, grown sick unto death
of the rule of the Slave-power in the General Government, arose in their
political might, and shook off this "Old Man of the Sea," electing,
beyond cavil and by the Constitutional mode, to the Presidential office,
a man who thoroughly represented in himself their conscience, on the one
hand, which instinctively revolted against human Slavery as a wrong
committed against the laws of God, and their sense of justice and equity
on the other, which would not lightly overlook, or interfere with vested
rights under the Constitution and the laws of man--the Conspirators had
reached the point at which they had been aiming ever since that failure
in 1832 of their first attempt at Disunion, in South Carolina.