ved in the principles of Democracy as he did
in a demonstration of Euclid,--all that might be said on the other
side was necessarily absurd. He applied to his own political creed
the literal teachings of the Bible. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
had held slaves without condemnation or rebuke from the Lord of
hosts, he believed that Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia might do
the same. He found in the case of Onesiums, St. Paul's explicit
approval of the Fugutive-slave Law of 1850, and in the cruel case
of Passmore Williamson he believed himself to be enforcing the
doctrines of the New Testament. Personally unwilling to hold even
a beast of burden in oppressive bondage, nothing could induce him
to condemn slave-holding in those whose conscience permitted them
to practice it. In the Abolitionists he found the chief disturbers
of the Republic, and he held New England answerable to posterity
and to God for all the heresies which afflicted either Church or
State. He had an uncompromising hostility to what are termed New-
England ideas, though the tenderest ties of his life were of New-
England origin. "The New-Englander individually I greatly affect,"
he often said, "but, in the mass, I judge them to be stark mad."
"I think, too," he would add, "that if you are going to make much
of a New-Englander, he should, like Dr. Johnson's Scotchman, be
caught young."

To his native State Judge Black was devotedly attached. He inherited
the blood of two strong elements of its population,--the German
and the Scotch-Irish,--and he united the best characteristics of
both in his own person. He had always looked upon Pennsylvania as
the guardian of the Federal Union, almost as the guarantor of its
safety and its perpetuity. He spoke of her as the break-water that
protected the slave States from the waves of radicalism which were
threatening to ingulf Southern institutions. The success of the
Republican party in 1860 he regarded as a portent of direst evil,
--indeed, as a present disaster, immeasurably sorrowful. The
excitement in the Southern States over the probability of Mr.
Lincoln's election he considered natural, their serious protest
altogether justifiable. He desired the free States to be awakened
to the gravity of the situation, to be thoroughly alarmed, and to
repent of their sins against the South. He wished it understood
from ocean to ocean that the position of the Republican party was
inconsistent with loyalty to the