said Alexander H. Stephens, soon
to be vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, is founded, its
cornerstone rests, upon the great physical, philosophical, and moral
truth, to which Jefferson and the men of his day were blind, that the
negro, by nature or the curse of Canaan, is not equal to the white man;
that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is, by ordination of
Providence, whose wisdom it is not for us to inquire into or question,
his natural and normal condition. As the apostle of such a principle the
South could not but abjure the old establishment, whose genius and
working were inevitably in the contrary direction. Many confessed it to
be the essential nature of our Government, and not unfair treatment
under it, against which they rebelled.

Slavery had also bred hatred of the Union indirectly, by fostering
anti-democratic habits of thought, feeling, and action. "The form of
liberty existed, the press seemed to be free, the deliberations of
legislative bodies were tumultuous, and every man boasted of his
independence. But the spirit of true liberty, tolerance of the minority
and respect for individual opinion, had departed, and those deceitful
appearances concealed the despotism of an inexorable master, slavery,
before whom the most powerful of slave-holders was himself but a slave,
as abject as the meanest." Over wide sections, untitled manorial lords,
"more intelligent than educated, brave but irascible, proud but
overbearing," controlled all voting and office-holding. Congressional
districts were their pocket-boroughs, and they ignored the common man
save to use him. The system grew, instead of statesmen, sectionalists,
whom love for the "peculiar institution" rendered callous to national
interests.

The vigorous secession movements in the South at once after Lincoln's
election, raised a question of the first magnitude, which few people at
the North had reflected upon since 1833, viz., whether or not
non-revolutionary secession was possible. Almost unanimously the North
denied such possibility, the South affirmed it. This was at bottom
manifestly nothing but the old question of state sovereignty over again.
The South held the Union to be a state compact, which the northern
parties thereto had broken. To prove the compact theory no new proof was
now adduced. Rather did the southern people take the assertion of it as
an axiom, with a simplicity which spoke volumes for the influence of
Calhoun and