appealed to the moral sense. Even "strong-minded" women
fearlessly went into fierce discussions, and became intolerant.
Gradually the whole North and West were aroused, not merely to the moral
evils of slavery, which were admitted without discussion, but to the
intolerable abomination of holding a slave under any conditions, as
against reason, against conscience, and against humanity.

The Southerners themselves felt that the evil was a great one, and made
some attempt to remedy it by colonization societies. They would send
free blacks to Liberia to Christianize and civilize the natives, sunk in
the lowest abyss of misery and shame. Many were the Christian men and
women at the South who pitied the hard condition under which their
slaves were born, and desired to do all they could to ameliorate it.

But when the Abolitionists announced that all slaveholding was a sin,
and when public opinion at the North was evidently drifting to this
doctrine, then the planters grew indignant and enraged. It became
unpleasant for a Northern merchant or traveller to visit a Southern
city, and equally unpleasant for a Southern student to enter a Northern
college, or a planter to resort to a Northern watering-place. The
common-sense of the planter was outraged when told that he was a sinner
above all others. He was exasperated beyond measure when incendiary
publications were transmitted through Southern mails. He did not believe
that he was necessarily immoral because he retained an institution
bequeathed to him by his ancestors, and recognized by the Constitution
of the United States.

Calhoun was the impersonation of Southern feelings as well as the
representative of Southern interests. He intensely felt the indignity
which the Abolitionists cast upon his native State, and upon its
peculiar institution. And he was clear-headed enough to see that if
public opinion settled down into the conviction that slavery was a sin
as well as an inherited evil, the North and South could not long live
together in harmony and peace. He saw that any institution would be
endangered with the verdict of the civilized world against it. He knew
that public opinion was an amazing power, which might be defied, but not
successfully resisted. He saw no way to stop the continually increasing
attacks of the antislavery agitators except by adopting an entirely new
position,--a position which should unite all the slaveholding States in
the strongest ties of interes