cording to recently published
narratives of these slave importations, with details that could not have
been related at the time with safety for the parties concerned, the
Federal authorities in the South seem to have made a sincere effort to
bring the slave-traders to justice, and the planters apparently did not
welcome the traffic.

The pioneers of the great struggle to come met on the plains of Kansas
and several years of fierce border strife ended in victory for freedom.
John Brown, whom the world calls a fanatic, perished on the scaffold at
Harper's Ferry in a vain attempt to liberate the slaves, and while
editors vacillated and quibbled, and fawning time servers applauded,
Thoreau, from his hermitage in the New England woods, paid eloquent
tribute to the man who dared to die for the truth. Away in the West a
figure was looming up, a gaunt, homely figure, born in and nurtured in
hardship, but endowed as no other man of his age was endowed, with the
ability to guide his country through the awful ordeal to come. He
perceived the right, and he boldly declared it. "If it is decreed that I
should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the
truth--let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right," said
Abraham Lincoln to the friends who disapproved his celebrated declaration
that the government could not endure half slave, half free. "In the right
to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand
earns, he (the negro) is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and
the equal of every living man"--was another sterling utterance which
struck home to the North.

While Lincoln was pleading the cause of human rights, and asserting that
the Declaration of Independence was meant for black as well as white,
members of President Buchanan's cabinet, holding in their grasp the reins
of National Government, were plotting the nation's overthrow. Even down
to the very moment that John B. Floyd left the War Office, and when South
Carolina was already in rebellion, this plotting was continued. As late
as the beginning of January, 1861, an attempt was made under an order
from Floyd to remove one hundred and fifty cannon from the Allegheny
Arsenal, at Pittsburg, to the South, to be used against the Union. "Our
people are a unit that not a gun shall be shipped South," said the
_Dispatch_ of that city, and without violence, without the shedding of a
drop of blood or the drawing of a weapon aga