chievous tenets, affords the best
excuse to be offered for the original abolitionists, but that can not be
conceded to the political associates who joined them for the purpose of
acquiring power; with them it was but hypocritical cant, intended to
deceive. Hence arose the declaration of the existence of an
"irrepressible conflict," because of the domestic institutions of
sovereign, self-governing States--institutions over which neither the
Federal Government nor the people outside of the limits of such States
had any control, and for which they could have no moral or legal
responsibility.

Those who are to come after us, and who will look without prejudice or
excitement at the record of events which have occurred in our day, will
not fail to wonder how men professing and proclaiming such a belief
should have so far imposed upon the credulity of the world as to be able
to arrogate to themselves the claim of being the special friends of a
Union contracted in order to insure "domestic tranquillity" among the
people of the States united; that _they_ were the advocates of peace, of
law, and of order, who, when taking an oath to support and maintain the
Constitution, did so with a mental reservation to violate one of the
provisions of that Constitution--one of the conditions of the
compact--without which the Union could never have been formed. The tone
of political morality which could make this possible was well indicated
by the toleration accorded in the Senate to the flippant,
inconsequential excuse for it given by one of its most eminent
exemplars--"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this
thing?"--meaning thereby, not that it would be the part of a dog to
_violate_ his oath, but to _keep_ it in the matter referred to. (See
Appendix D.)

[Footnote 12: Extract from a speech of Mr. Davis, of Mississippi, in the
Senate of the United States, May 17, 1860: "There is a relation
belonging to this species of property, unlike that of the apprentice or
the hired man, which awakens whatever there is of kindness or of
nobility of soul in the heart of him who owns it; this can only be
alienated, obscured, or destroyed, by collecting this species of
property into such masses that the owner is not personally acquainted
with the individuals who compose it. In the relation, however, which can
exist in the Northwestern Territories, the mere domestic connection of
one, two, or at most half a dozen servants in a family, associating w