hat Mr. Buchanan
received the information which induced him to dwell at length in
his annual message on this painful feature of the situation. But
it was probably an invention of Mr. Slidell's fertile brain--imposed
upon the President and intended to influence public sentiment in
the North. It was in flat contradiction of the general faith in
the personal fealty of their slaves, so constantly boasted by the
Southern men,--a faith abundantly justified by the subsequent fact
that four years of war passed without a single attempt to servile
insurrection. At the time of the John Brown disturbance the South
resented the imputation of fear, made upon it by the North. If
now the danger was especially imminent, Southern leaders were solely
to blame. They would not accept the honorable assurance of the
Republican party and of the President-elect that no interference
with slavery in the States was designed. They insisted in all
their public addresses that Mr. Lincoln was determined to uproot
slavery everywhere, and they might well fear that these repeated
declarations had been heard and might be accepted by their slaves.

The omission by individual senators to present the grievances which
justified secession is perhaps less notable then the same omission
by the conventions which ordained secession in the several States.
South Carolina presented, as a special outrage, the enactment of
personal-liberty bills in the free States, and yet, from the
foundation of the Federal Government, she had probably never lost
a slave in consequence of these enactments. In Georgia the attempt
at justification reached the ludicrous when solemn charge was made
that a bounty had been paid from the Federal Treasury to New-England
fishermen. The tariff was complained of, the navigation laws were
sneered at. But these were all public policies which had been in
operation with Southern consent and largely with Southern support,
throughout the existence of the Republic. When South Carolina
attempted, somewhat after the illustrious model of the Declaration
of Independence, to present justifying reasons for her course, the
very authors of the document must have seen that it amounted only
to a parody.

Finding no satisfactory exhibit of grievances, either in the speeches
of senators or in the declarations of conventions, one naturally
infers that the Confederate Government, when formally organized at
Montgomery in February, must have given a full