tried to destroy the Union, which they really valued, for the sake of
slavery, which they valued more; they in fact destroyed slavery; and they
did this, it is said, in alarm at an imaginary danger. This is not a
true ground of reproach to them. It is true that the danger to slavery
from the election of Lincoln was not immediately pressing. He neither
would have done nor could have done more than to prevent during his four
years of office any new acquisition of territory in the slave-holding
interest, and to impose his veto on any Bill extending slavery within the
existing territory of the Union. His successor after four years might or
might not have been like-minded. He did not seem to stand for any
overwhelming force in American politics; there was a majority opposed to
him in both Houses of Congress; a great majority of the Supreme Court,
which might have an important part to play, held views of the
Constitution opposed to his; he had been elected by a minority only of
the whole American people. Why could not the Southern States have sat
still, secure that no great harm would happen to their institution for
the present, and hoping that their former ascendency would come back to
them with the changing fortunes of party strife? This is an argument
which might be expected to have weighed with Southern statesmen if each
of them had been anxious merely to keep up the value of his own slave
property for his own lifetime, but this was far from being their case.
It is hard for us to put ourselves at the point of view of men who could
sincerely speak of their property in negroes as theirs by the "decree of
the Creator"; but it is certain that within the last two generations
trouble of mind as to the rightfulness of slavery had died out in a large
part of the South; the typical Southern leader valued the peculiar form
of society under which he lived and wished to hand it on intact to his
children's children. If their preposterous principle be granted, the
most extreme among them deserve the credit of statesmanlike insight for
having seen, the moment that Lincoln was elected, that they must strike
for their institution now if they wished it to endure. The Convention of
South Carolina justly observed that the majority in the North had voted
that slavery was sinful; they had done little more than express this
abstract opinion, but they had done all that. Lincoln's administration
might have done apparently little, and afte