the feelings of each towards the other. The battle fought Chap. I. between the two contending principles in Kansas, as in an arena, under the eyes of the whole Union--a contest in which each party held its own Conventions, framed its own Constitution, and shot down its adversaries without scruple or remorse-contributed powerfully to inflame these feelings. The people of the North learnt to regard slavery as an aggressive power, which it was necessary to combat, restrain, subdue. They saw that, condemned elsewhere by law and opinion, and hardly keeping a precarious foothold in one or two countries, not the foremost in the march of civilization, it had Congress, and the dates at which Free and Slave States were respectively admitted into the Union, are shown in the subjoined Tables : : NUMBER of Representatives in Congress assigned to each of the FREE STATES. STATES. With Date of Admission into 1790. 1800. 1810. 1820. 1830. 1840. 1850. the Union. Chap. I. fixed its empire within the United States, was working steadily to extend that empire, and aimed at nothing less than to stamp on the Republic for ever the character of a great Slave Power. Attention was directed to its economical results; its influence on the growth of wealth and population began to be rudely canvassed, and its value as an instrument of production was exposed to searching inquiry. The abolitionist agitation, which had not before been formidable, gained strength, and a great party arose, which, not unanimous on all other points, acknowledged as its common principle the duty of resisting, at all costs, the further extension of slavery. "The United States," Mr. Seward declared, in 1858, "must and will, sooner or later, become entirely a (Note continued from page 21.) SLAVE STATES. STATES. With Date of Admission into 1790. 1800. 1810. 1820. 1830. 1840. 1850. slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labour nation." "We shall help," cried Mr. Sumner of Massachusetts, "to expel the slave oligarchy from all its seats of national power and drive it back within the States. Prostrated, exposed, and permanently expelled from ill-gotten power, the oligarchy will soon cease to exist as a political combination. Its final doom may be postponed, but it is certain. In its retreat, smarting under the indignation of an aroused people and the concurring judgment of the civilized world, it must die-it may be as a poisoned rat dies, of rage in its hole. Meanwhile all good omens are ours. The work cannot stop. Quickened by the 1 "Our country is a theatre which exhibits in full operation two radically different political systems, the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labour, the other on the basis of voluntary labour of freemen. The two systems are at once perceived to be incongruous. Both never have permanently existed together in one country, and they never can. Hitherto the systems have existed in different States, but side by side within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is a Confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States constitutes only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroad and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation. Thus these antago nistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision ensues. Shall I tell you what this collision means? It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will sooner or later become entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labour nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labour, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandize alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to the slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the Slave and Free States, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral."— Speech at Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858. Chap. I. Chap. I. triumph now at hand, with a Republican President in power, State after State, quitting the condition of a Territory, and spurning slavery, will be welcomed into our plural unit, and, joining hands together, will become a belt of fire about the Slave States, in which slavery must die." "I believe," said the sober judgment of the man who afterwards became President of the United States, "this Government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South." In the South itself the contest had not failed to produce its natural effects. It had strengthened powerfully throughout the Slave States the common tie of sectional interest and feeling; it had accustomed them to regard the Free States as opponents, if not as enemies; and the counter-movement in the North, as it advanced, awoke in the Southern people, high-spirited, hasty, and sensitive, as we have seen, from the character of their institutions, to the least approach of danger, the liveliest emotions of anger and alarm-a state of mind more prone than any other to precipitation and less accessible to reason. The tendencies of Northern opinion were exaggerated; slavery itself, no longer defended as a necessary evil, was eulogised with almost fantastic extravagance. The journals were filled with violent abuse of everything Northern; and two old grievances-the imperfect execution of the laws providing for the sur 1 Mr. Lincoln's Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 17, 1858. render of runaway slaves, and the injustice of a protective tariff, were insisted on with new and redoubled vehemence. II. The Constitution of the Union, framed at a time when slavery had ceased in one at least of the Thirteen States, and was in process of extinction in others, regarded the relation of master and slave as what it was in fact a local institution-the creature of local laws, existing where those laws had force, and not existing elsewhere. It contains, however, the following clause, introduced at the instance of South Carolina shortly before the Convention concluded its labours: "No person held to service or labour in one State under the law thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due." An account of the insertion of this clause and a defence of it may be read in Mr. Curtis's History of the Constitution of the United States.1 "It was regarded at the time," observes that lucid and careful writer, "by the Southern States as absolutely necessary to secure to them their right of exclusive control over the question of emancipation; and it was adopted in the Convention by unanimous consent, for the express purpose of protecting a right that would otherwise have been without satisfactory security." It was held by the Supreme Court that the power and duty created by this clause belong exclusively to the Government of the United States, and that Congress alone could legislate on the subject; that Congress itself could not exact from the several States any service which they were unwilling to perform; and that laws made by the States to prevent, or even to assist, the arrest and recovery of fugitive slaves were unconstitutional and void. This 1 Book iv, chap. xv. 2 Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Peters's R. xvi, 539, 622. The judgment of the Supreme Court was pronounced by Mr. Justice Story. Chap. I. |