at cow-hide factory); and the New York men,
owners of the fastest horses and finest houses in the land, having made a
sort of Brummagem Paris of their city, were the bankers and brokers of the
Southerners, while the latter were their legislators.

The grip the slaveholders had fastened on the helm of the State had been
tightening for nearly half a century, till the government of the nation
had become literally theirs, and the idea of their relinquishing it was
one which the North did not contemplate, and they would not tolerate.

If I have said nothing of the grievances which the South has alleged
against the North--its tariff, made chiefly in the interest of the
north-eastern manufacturing States, or its inconsiderable but enthusiastic
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Abolition party--it is because I do not
believe these causes of complaint would have had the same effect upon any
but a community of slaveholders, men made impatient (by the life-long
habit of despotism), not only of all control, but of any opposition.
Thirty years ago Andrew Jackson--a man of keen sagacity as well as
determined energy--wrote of them that they were bent upon destroying the
Union, and that, whatever was the pretext of their discontent, that was
their aim and purpose. 'To-day,' he wrote, 'it is the tariff, by and by it
will be slavery.' The event has proved how true a prophet he was. My own
conviction is that the national character produced and fostered by
slaveholding is incompatible with free institutions, and that the
Southern aristocracy, thanks to the pernicious influences by which they
are surrounded, are unfit to be members of a Christian republic. It is
slavery that has made the Southerners rebels to their government, traitors
to their country, and the originators of the bloodiest civil war that ever
disgraced humanity and civilisation. It is for their sinful complicity in
slavery, and their shameful abandonment of all their duties as citizens,
that the Northerners are paying in the blood of their men, the tears of
their women, and the treasure which they have till now held more precious
than their birthright. They must now not merely impose a wise restriction
upon slavery, they must be prepared to extinguish it. They neglected and
despised the task of moderating its conditions and checking its growth;
they must now suddenly, in the midst of unparalleled difficulties and
dangers, be ready to deal summarily with its entire existence. Th