f battle was foreseen and
predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional
divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the
seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon
the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a
quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would
be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight
which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union
was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but through
the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two
sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half a
century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the
system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the
sight of his descendants, that "by an inevitable chain of causes and
effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." The
Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he
saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of
Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year
when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned
us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the
cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The
descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny," the "petty tyrants"
as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to
love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they
tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet
where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous
emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become changed
by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness.

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden
harvest of crime. Violence stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and
perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly organized
conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief
stronghold of the Union. That the principle which underlay these acts of
fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed
sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler o