DOOM OF TRAITORS.-SELF-CONDEMNATION. 275 whom he regards as such to something a little more disagreeable than such a shower of fire and brimstone as came down upon the cities of the plain. We of course understand what is couched under the glowing phrase, that "it was ours to redeem this continent, to spread freedom, civilization, and religion, through the whole length of the land." We have shown this in a previous chapter, when speaking of the Slavery Propagandists among whom Dr. Thornwell was a High Priest; that to "redeem" the continent was to convert it into slave territory; that "freedom" means the relation of master and slave, the slave to come from Africa if he could be obtained; the master to be a white man if "rich," or to be a slave if "poor;" that the "civilization" was to be universally of this type; and that the "religion" was to be that which should sanction all this 66 as divine," and any thing preached in opposition was to be "infidelity" and proof of "apostasy." Patriotism and treason are also understood. To be a "patriot" was to give heart and soul, tongue, pen, purse, and ballot for such a "destiny" to one's country; and to be a "traitor" was to oppose such a destiny, or, if living at the South, to hesitate and falter about aiding to bring it about. And then so glorious to us and so philanthropic to mankind was such a destiny, and so correspondingly deep was the guilt of all who were "reprobates and traitors" to it, that their "judgment lingers not" and their "damnation slumbers not," but is rapidly approaching in the form of a shower-bath like that which came upon Sodom! Well, gentlemen, all we have to say, is, that when the actual trial and doom of " traitors" shall come, we hope you will stand up to it like men, and let justice take its course. CHAPTER VIII. SOUTHERN PROVIDENCE IN THE REBELLION. THE doctrine of a Divine Providence in the affairs of men is a tenet of both natural and revealed theology. It has been the common belief of all nations and all times. It has been taught by the priests of every sect in religion, received by the sages of every school in philosophy, and sung by the poets of every age of the world. The bard of Avon has but expressed the sober judgment of mankind when uttering a sentiment which we may take in its utmost latitude of application, There's a divinity that shapes our ends, GOD'S PROVIDENCE EXTENDS TO NATIONS. This providence has been conceded to extend to nations. as truly as to individual men. Without the light of Scrip ture, this has been an accepted truth; in that light, we read it on every page. It is concerned in the birth of nations, in their progress, and in their downfall. It attends them in peace and in war, gives them their rulers, awards their prosperity and glory, and brings them to honor or ruin. In the rise of nations, in their career, in their permanent endurance or in their passing away to give place to others, an unceasing round through all the cycles of time, God is but accomplishing His eternal purposes, in the execution of which "He doeth according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth." ITS DESIGNS TOWARDS THE UNITED STATES. 277 ITS DESIGNS TOWARDS THE UNITED STATES. It has been the common belief, through every period of the comparatively short career of the American people, that this doctrine of providence had a special significance in its application to this nation, as bearing upon its own well-being and that of other nations of the world. The time of the discovery of the American Continent, the circumstances of its colonization, the character of its early settlers, the planting here upon a broad basis of the doctrine of civil and religious liberty, the formation of a system of popular government under a written constitution, the freedom of the right of suffrage, the universality of the means of education, the unrestricted protection to the various forms of religion, the wide domain and unlimited resources of a country extending through twenty degrees of latitude and fifty-five of longitude, and the unsurpassed material prosperity which has been developed in the departments of agriculture, manufactures, commerce, trade, inventive skill, and the mechanic arts; all this, which had placed the United States, with her more than thirty millions of people, in the front rank among the most favored nations of the earth, in an age of unparalleled progress, had contributed to the fond anticipation, indulged down to the period of the rebellion, that God had given us a high destiny to fill, of honor to ourselves and of good to mankind. When foul treason plotted the overthrow of the Government, the hearts of many failed them. They were led to think they had wholly misinterpreted the purposes of God, however plainly they had supposed them indicated in the remarkable facts of our history. There may have been much of national vanity indulged in these glowing prospects; but many were led to hope for their realization, prompted by the purest impulses. THE DEAD FLY IN THE OINTMENT. In all the phases of our history, there was one subject which gave pain and apprehension to many of the more sagacious and reflecting. That in a Government consecrated by the blood of martyrs to liberty, and founded on the principle announced in its earliest records, the freedom and equality of rights of all men,-there should be incorporated into its supreme organic law a concession in several specifications to the bondage of millions of human beings, was an anomaly so monstrous as to provoke the jeers of foreign despots, and bring down upon the Model Republic the daily growing scorn of the Christian world. However men may view the case from our present historical stand-point, we are not now disposed to bring any reproach upon those great men who founded our National Government, for admitting that element into its structure. Surrounded by the perils which succeeded the Revolutionary War, and under the practical failure of the Articles of Confederation, they found that "a more perfect union" was essential to national existence, and at that time union in one nationality could only be secured by the Govern ment they formed. But it is as clearly written upon the history of those times as is any other fact of the period, that many of the leading statesmen, North and South, who were concerned in forming the Constitution of the United States, disapproved of slavery as an institution, and confidently counted on and desired its termination. King Cotton was then in his infancy, or scarcely born, and it was not then dreamed that he would ever come to the throne and usurp so wide a dominion.* For proof of what is above asserted, that "leading statesmen," in the era of the formation of the Constitution, "disapproved of Slavery," and "counted on and desired its termination,"-and that this was "the common sentiment" of that day,we refer to the speech of the rebel Vice-President, quoted on page 49. Mr. Stephens's THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT. 279 THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT. As in our history we advanced from step to step; as slavery became more profitable and more expanded; as under its profits, and under the change in sentiment regarding its character, it became more and more exorbitant in its demands, the anxiety concerning its effect upon the destiny of the nation became daily more intense. Under the later developments of the character and tendencies of the institution, that sentiment which has sometimes been attributed to the President, and again to the Secretary of State, and for which much reproach has been heaped upon them by the rebels and their "allies," that it were impossible for this nation to continue half slave and half free,— was but the utterance of what a far-reaching sagacity saw to be inevitable. It was no incendiary tenet, as shallowbrained demagogues have termed it. It was the simple announcement of a great fact whose certain coming already cast its shadow before. It was but the prediction of an "irrepressible conflict" which even some of the fathers of the Revolutionary era feared, and which was sure to occur in God's own plan. Its undoubted existence in the womb of time, the throes and convulsions which its issuing forth would occasion, would have been all the same if they had not foreseen and declared it. They did not create it. They were not responsible for it. It was an inevitable outgrowth of the system of Government our fathers formed.* testimony will be deemed valid, and save the trouble of quoting from the original sources. *Thomas Jefferson announced the "irrepressible conflict." We at present state it on the authority of the Rebel Vice-President. In his speech at Savannah, Georgia, March 21, 1861, Mr. Stephens said: "African Slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization-this was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as 'the rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was |