rritory, important as it was in a national point of
view,--but coveted by the South mainly as the fruitful mother of
slave-holding States, and for the precedent it established, that the
Constitution was a barrier only to what should impede, never to what
might promote, the interests of Slavery,--was the first great stride
she made as she stalked to her design. The admission of Missouri as a
slaveholding State, granted after a struggle that shook American
society to the centre, and then only on the memorable promises now
broken to the ear as well as to the hope, was the next vantage-ground
seized and maintained. The nearly contemporary purchase of Florida,
though in design and in effect as revolutionary an action as that of
Louisiana, excited comparatively little opposition. It was but the
following up of an acknowledged victory by the Slave Power. The long
and bloody wars in her miserable swamps, waged against the
humanity of savages that gave shelter to the fugitives from her
tyranny,--slave-hunts, merely, on a national scale and at the common
expense,--followed next in the march of events. Then Texas loomed in
the distance, and, after years of gradual approach and covert
advances, was first wrested from Mexico. Slavery next indissolubly
chained to her, and then, by a _coup d'etat_ of astonishing impudence,
was added, by a flourish of John Tyler's pen, in the very article of
his political dissolution, to "the Area of Freedom!" Next came the war
with Mexico, lying in its pretences, bloody in its conduct, triumphant
in its results, for it won vast regions suitable for Slavery now, and
taught the way to win larger conquests when her ever-hungry maw should
crave them. What need to recount the Fugitive-Slave Bill, and the
other "Compromises" of 1850? or to recite the base repeal of the
Missouri Compromise, showing the slaveholder's regard for promises to
be as sacred as that of a pettifogger for justice or of a dicer for an
oath? or to point to the plains of Kansas, red with the blood of her
sons and blackened with the cinders of her towns, while the President
of the United States held the sword of the nation at her throat to
compel her to submission?

Success, perpetual and transcendent, such as has always waited on
Slavery in all her attempts to mould the history of the country and to
compel the course of its events to do her bidding, naturally excites a
measure of curiosity if not of admiration, in the mind of every
obs