ew ever
more apparent. Lincoln had declared: "A house divided against itself
cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not
expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other." Seward, too, had said:
"The United States must and will, sooner or later, become either
entirely a slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation." Between the
two systems there was an "irrepressible conflict." But he added that he
desired and expected the triumph of freedom "not otherwise than through
the action of the several States, co-operating with the Federal
Government, and all acting in conformity with their respective
constitutions." Yet over these utterances of Lincoln and Seward some
conservatives in the party shook their heads, as liable to be
misinterpreted and to needlessly alarm the South. But men more radical
than Lincoln and Seward were coming to the front. Sumner was silenced
for the time, but among the leaders of Massachusetts now appeared John
A. Andrew, her future war Governor, large-brained and large-hearted. In
this year, 1858, at the State convention of which he was president, he
said, "I believe in the Republican party because I believe that slavery,
the servitude of humanity, has no business to exist anywhere; because it
has no business to exist and no right to be supported where the sun
shines or grass grows or water runs."

One of the sensations of the time was a book, dated 1857, which showed a
rift in the solid South. It was _The Impending Crisis_, by Hinton Rowan
Helper, a North Carolinian by long descent, birth, and residence; the
son of "a merciful slave-holder"; writing at the age of twenty-seven.
His standpoint was that of the non-slave-holding Southern white. "Yankee
wives"--so he begins--"have written the most popular anti-slavery
literature of the day. Against this I have nothing to say; it is all
well enough for women to give the pictures of slavery; men should give
the facts." His method is largely the comparison of the industrial
progress of the two sections, and his chief arsenal is the United States
census. North and South started, he says, with the establishment of the
government and the North's abolition of slavery, with advantage in soil,
climate, rivers, harbors, minerals, forests, etc., on the side of the
South, but in sixty years she has b