sion based itself, in profession and in reality, wholly on the
question of slavery. There lay the grievance, and for that alone a
remedy was to be had even at the price of sundering the Union. Later,
when actual war broke out, other considerations than slavery came into
play. To unite and animate the South came the doctrine of State rights,
the sympathy of neighborhood, and the primal human impulse of
self-defense. But the critical movement, the action which first sundered
the Union and so led to war,--was inspired wholly and solely by the
defense and maintenance of slavery. The proposition is almost too plain
for argument. But it receives illustration from the great debate in the
Georgia Legislature, when Toombs advocated Secession and Stephens
opposed it. Toombs, evidently unwilling to rest the case wholly on
slavery, alleged three other grievances at the hands of the North--the
fishery bounties, the navigation laws, and the protective tariff.
Stephens easily brushed aside the bounties and navigation laws as bygone
or unimportant. As to the tariff, he showed that the last tariff law,
enacted in 1857, was supported by every Massachusetts member of Congress
and every Georgia member, including Toombs himself. What further he said
belongs to a later chapter. But he was unquestionably right, and all
rational history confirms it, that the one force impelling the South to
Secession was the imperilled interest of slavery.

But the resistance which Secession encountered from the North was from
the outset other and wider than hostility to slavery. Anti-slavery
feeling was indeed strong in the Northern heart; the restriction of
slavery was the supreme principle of the Republican party; the
resentment that the national bond should be menaced in the interest of
slavery gave force to the opposition which Secession instantly aroused.
But, on the one hand, the extreme opponents of slavery, Garrison and his
followers, were now, as they had always been, willing and more than
willing that the South should go off and take slavery with it. And on
the other hand, the anti-secessionists of the nation included a
multitude, North and South, who were either friendly to slavery or
indifferent to it. Even of the Republican party the mass were more
concerned for the rights of the white man than of the black man. They
were impatient of the dominance of the government by the South, and
meant to unseat the Southern oligarchy from the place of power a