he shrank from inviting.
The political conditions four years had indeed modified in one important
particular at least. In Calhoun's lifetime, there was no Northern leader
bold enough to undertake to engineer an act of abrogation through
Congress. If the North were willing, possessed sufficient magnanimity,
to surrender, in the interest of brotherly love between the sections,
the benefits which inured to it under the Missouri Compromise, neither
Calhoun nor the South would have declined the proffered sacrifice. The
selection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1854 as the leader of the movement
for repeal put a new face on the business, which was thereby made to
appear to proceed from the free, not from the slave States. This was
adroit, the fixing upon the losing section the initiative and the
responsibility of the act of abrogation.

Besides this element, there was another not less specious which lent to
the scheme an air of fairness, and that was the application to the
Territories of the American principle of local self-government, in other
words, the leaving to the people of the Territories the right to vote
slavery up or vote it down, as they might elect. The game was a deep
one, worthy of the machinations of its Northern and Southern authors.
But, like other elaborate schemes of mice and men, it went to pieces
under the fatal stroke of an unexpected circumstance. The act which
abrogated the Missouri Compromise broke the much-enduring back of
Northern patience at the same time. In the struggle for the repeal
Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats forgot their traditionary party
differences in battling for Southern interests, which was not more or
less than the extension to the national Territories of the peculiar
institution. The final recognition of this ugly fact on the part of the
free States, raised a popular flood in them big enough to whelm the Whig
party and to float a great political organization, devoted to
uncompromising opposition to the farther extension of slavery. The
sectionalism of slavery was at last met by the sectionalism of freedom.
From that moment the old Union, with its slave compromises, was doomed.
In the conflict then impending its dissolution was merely a matter of
time, unless indeed the North should prove strong enough to preserve it
by the might of its arms, seeing that the North still clung passionately
to the idea of national unity.

Not so, however, was it with Garrison. Sharper and sterner ro