simply a right, was the exclusion of the South from equality in
the enjoyment of territory which justly belonged equally to both, and
which was what the enemies of the South stigmatized as "slave
territory," when acquired.

The sectional policy then indicated brought to its support the passions
that spring from man's higher nature, but which, like all passions, if
misdirected and perverted, become hurtful and, it may be, destructive.
The year 1835 was marked by the public agitation for the abolition of
that African servitude which existed in the South, which antedated the
Union, and had existed in every one of the States that formed the
Confederation. By a great misconception of the powers belonging to the
General Government, and the responsibilities of citizens of the Northern
States, many of those citizens were, little by little, brought to the
conclusion that slavery was a sin for which _they_ were answerable, and
that it was the duty of the Federal Government to abate it. Though, at
the date above referred to, numerically so weak, when compared with
either of the political parties at the North, as to excite no
apprehension of their power for evil, the public demonstrations of the
Abolitionists were violently rebuked generally at the North. The party
was contemned on account of the character of its leaders, and the more
odious because chief among them was an Englishman, one Thompson, who was
supposed to be an emissary, whose mission was to prepare the way for a
dissolution of the Union. Let us hope that it was reverence for the
obligations of the Constitution as the soul of the Union that suggested
lurking danger, and rendered the supposed emissary for its destruction
so odious that he was driven from a Massachusetts hall where he
attempted to lecture. But bodies in motion will overcome bodies at rest,
and the unreflecting too often are led by captivating names far from the
principles they revere.

Thus, by the activity of the propagandists of abolitionism, and the
misuse of the sacred word Liberty, they recruited from the ardent
worshipers of that goddess such numbers as gave them in many Northern
States the balance of power between the two great political forces that
stood arrayed against each other; then and there they came to be courted
by both of the great parties, especially by the Whigs, who had become
the weaker party of the two. Fanaticism, to which is usually accorded
sincerity as an extenuation of its mis