elect delegates for that purpose, after a census taken to demonstrate the fact, that the population of the Territory equalled or exceeded the ratio of representation for a member of the House of Representatives.

Thus ended the six months' discussion of the Kansas question in Congress in 1858. The substitute to the Land Ordinance was rejected by the voters of the Territory; and Kansas did not come into the Union until nearly three years afterwardsjust as the Southern States were going out of it. She came in under an anti-slavery constitution, and Mr. Buchanan signed the bill of admission.

The discussions of the Kansas question, as summed in the preceding pages, had materially weakened the Union. The spirit of those discussions, and the result itself of the controversy, fairly indicated that the South could hardly expect, under any circumstances, the addition of another Slave State to the Union. The Southern mind was awakened; the sentimental reverences of more than half a century were decried; and men began to calculate the precise value of a Union which, by its mere name and the paraphrases of demagogues, had long governed their affections.

Some of these calculations, as they appeared in the newspaper presses of the times, were curious, and soon commenced to interest the Southern people. It was demonstrated to them that their section had been used to contribute the bulk of the revenues of the Government; that the North derived forty to fifty millions of annual revenue from the South, through the operations of the tariff; and that the aggregate of the trade of the South in Northern markets was four hundred millions of dollars a year. It was calculated by a Northern writer, that the harvest of gain reaped by the North from the Union, from unequal taxations and the courses of trade as between the two sections, exceeded two hundred millions of dollars per year.

These calculations of the commercial cost of the "glorious Union" to the South, only presented the question in a single aspect, however striking that was. There were other aspects no less important and no less painful, in which it was to be regarded. The swollen and insolent power of Abolitionism threatened to carry every thing before it; it had already bro

ken the vital principle of the Constitution-that of the equality of its parts; and to injuries already accomplished, it added the bitterest threats and the most insufferable insolence.

While the anti-slavery power threatened never to relax its efforts until, in the language of Mr. Seward, a senator from New York, the "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and freedom was accomplished, and the soil of the Carolinas dedicated to the institutions of New England, it affected the insolent impertinence of regarding the Union as a concession on the part of the North, and of taunting the South with the disgrace which her association in the Union inflicted upon the superior and more virtuous people of the Northern States. The excesses of this conceit are ridiculous, seen in the light of subsequent events. It was said that the South was an inferior part of the country; that she was a spotted and degraded section; that the national fame abroad was compromised by the association of the South in the Union; and that a New England traveller in Europe blushed to confess himself an American, because half of the nation of that name were slaveholders. Many of the Abolitionists made a pretence of praying that the Union might be dissolved, that they might be cleared, by the separation of North and South, of any implication in the crime of slavery. Even that portion of the party calling themselves "Republicans" affected that the Union stood in the way of the North. Mr. Banks, of Massachusetts, who had been elected Speaker of the House in the Thirty-first Congress, had declared that the designs of his party were not to be baffled, and was the author of the coarse jeer-"Let the Union slide." The New York Tribune had complained that the South"could not be kicked out of the Union." Mr. Seward, the great Republican leader, had spread the evangely of a natural, essential, and irrepressible hostility between the two sections; and the North prepared to act on a suggestion, the only practical result of which could be to cleave the Union apart, and to inaugurate the horrors of civil war.

The raid into Virginia of John Brown, a notorious Aboli tionist, whose occupations in Kansas had been those of a horsethief and assassin, and his murder of peaceful and unsuspect· ing citizens at Harper's Ferry in the month of October, 1859, was a practical illustration of the lessons of the Northern Re

publicans, and of their inevitable and, in fact, logical conclusion in civil war. Professed conservatives in the North predicted that this outrage would be productive of real good in their section, in opening the eyes of the people to what were well characterized as "Black Republican" doctrines. This prediction was not verified by succeeding events. The Northern elections of the next month showed no diminution in the Black Republican vote. The manifestations of sympathy for John Brown, who had expiated his crime on a gallows in Virginia, were unequivocal in all parts of the North, though comparatively few openly justified the outrage. Bells were tolled in various towns of New England on the day of his execution, with the knowledge of the local authorities, and in some instances, through their co-operation; and not a few preachers from the pulpit alloted him an apotheosis, and consigned his example to emulation, as one not only of public virtue, but of particular service to God.

The attachment of the South to the Union was steadily weakening in the historical succession of events. The nomination in December, 1859, to the Speakership of the House of Representatives of Mr. Sherman, of Ohio, who had made himself especially odious to the South by publicly recommending, in connection with sixty-eight other Republican members, a fanatical document popularly known as "Helper's Book,"*

*The tone of this book was violent in the extreme. We add a few extracts, which will enable the reader to form a correct opinion of the character and object of the work

"Slavery is a great moral, social, civil, and political evil, to be got rid of at the earliest practical period."-(Page 168.)

"Three-quarters of a century hence, if the South retains slavery, which God forbid she will be to the North what Poland is to Russia, Cuba to Spain, and Ireland to England."-(P. 163.)

"Our own banner is inscribed-No co-operation with slaveholders in politics; no fellowship with them in religion; no affiliation with them in society; no recognition of pro-slavery men, except as ruffians, outlaws, and criminals."-P 156.)

"We believe it is as it ought to be, the desire, the determination, and the destiny of the Republican party to give the death-blow to slavery."-(P. 234.) "In any event, come what will, transpire what may, the institution of slavery must be abolished."-(P. 180.)

"We are determined to abolish slavery at all hazards—in defiance of all the opposition, of whatever nature, it is possible for the slaveocrats to bring

from the name of the author, and which openly defended and sought itself to excite servile insurrections in the South, produced a marked effect in Congress, and was encountered by the Southern members with a determined spirit of opposition. The entire Southern delegation gave warning that they would regard the election of Mr. Sherman, or of any man with his record, as an open declaration of war upon the institutions of the South; as much so, some of the members declared, as if the Brown raid were openly approved by a majority of the House of Representatives. The Black Republican party defiantly nominated Sherman, and continued to vote for him for near two months, giving him within four votes of a majority upon every trial of his strength. Although he was finally withdrawn, and one of his party, not a subscriber to the Helper Book, was elected, yet the fact that more than threefourths of the entire Northern delegation had adhered to Mr. Sherman for nearly two months in a factious and fanatical spirit, produced a deep impression on the minds of Southern members and of their constituents. The early dissolution of the Union had come to be a subject freely canvassed among members of Congress.

With the unveiling of the depth of the designs of the Black Republican party, another danger was becoming manifest to the South. It was the demoralization of the Northern Democratic party on the slavery question. This whole party had been an unhealthy product; its very foundation was a principle of untruth, and false to its own section, it could not be expected to adhere to friends whom it had made from interest and who had fallen into adverse circumstances. It had united with the South for political power. In the depression of that power, and the rapid growth of the anti-slavery party in the

against us. Of this they may take due notice, and govern themselves accordingly." (P. 149.)

"It is our honest conviction that all the pro-slavery slaveholders deserve at once to be reduced to a parallel with the basest criminals that lie fettered within the cells of our public prisons."-(P. 158.)

"Shall we pat the bloodhounds of slavery? Shall we fee the curs of slavery? Shall we pay the whelps of slavery? No, never."-(P. 329.)

"Our purpose is as firmly fixed as the eternal pillars of heaven; we have determined to abolish slavery, and, so help us God! abolish it we will.”— P. 187.)

North, it had no hesitation in courting and conciliating the ruling element. This disposition was happily accommodated by the controversy which had taken place between Mr. Douglas and the administration of Mr. Buchanan. The anti-slavery sentiment in the North was conciliated by the partisans of the Illinois demagogue, in adopting a new principle for the government of the Territories, which was to allow the people to determine the question of slavery in their territorial capacity, without awaiting their organization as a State, and thus to risk the decision of the rights of the South on the verdict of a few settlers on the public domain. This pander to the antislåvery sentiment of the North was concealed under the demagogical name of "popular sovereignty," and was imposed upon the minds of not a few of the Southern people by the artfulness of its appeals to the name of a principle, which had none of the substance of justice or equality. The concealment, however, was but imperfectly availing. The doctrine of Mr. Douglas was early denounced by one of the most vigilant statesmen of the South as "a short cut to all the ends of Black Republicanism ;" and later in time, while the "Helper Book" controversy was agitating the country, and other questions developing the union of all the anti-slavery elements for war upon the South, a senator from Georgia was found bold enough to denounce, in his place in Congress, the entire Democratic party of the North as unreliable and "rotten."

The State Rights party of the South had co-operated with the Democracy of the North in the Presidential canvass of 1856, upon the principles of the platform adopted by the National Democratic Convention, assembled in Cincinnati, in June of that year. They expressed a willingness to continue this co-operation in the election of 1860, upon the principles of the Cincinnati platform; but demanded, as a condition precedent to this, that the question of the construction of this platform should be satisfactorily settled. To this end, the State Rights Democratic party in several of the Southern States defined the conditions upon which their delegates should hold seats in the National Convention, appointed to meet at Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860. The Democracy in Alabama moved first. On the 11th of January, 1860, they met in convention at Montgomery, and adopted a series of resolu