southern church soon produced
an "unexampled unanimity" on the other side, broken only when some fiery
and indomitable abolitionist like Dr. Robert J. Breckinridge, of the
Presbyterian Church in Kentucky, delivered his soul with invectives
against the system of slavery and the new-fangled apologies that had
been devised to defend it, declaring it "utterly indefensible on every
correct human principle, and utterly abhorrent from every law of God,"
and exclaiming, "Out upon such folly! The man who cannot see that
involuntary domestic slavery, as it exists among us, is founded on the
principle of taking by force that which is another's has simply no
moral sense.... Hereditary slavery is without pretense, except in avowed
rapacity."[282:1] Of course the antislavery societies which, under
various names, had existed in the South by hundreds were suddenly
extinguished, and manumissions, which had been going on at the rate of
thousands in a year, almost entirely ceased.

The strange and swiftly spreading moral epidemic did not stop at State
boundary lines. At the North the main cause of defection was not,
indeed, directly operative. There was no danger there of servile
insurrection. But there was true sympathy for those who lived under the
shadow of such impending horrors, threatening alike the guilty and the
innocent. There was a deep passion of honest patriotism, now becoming
alarmed lest the threats of disunion proceeding from the terrified South
should prove a serious peril to the nation in whose prosperity the hopes
of the world seemed to be involved. There was a worthy solicitude lest
the bonds of intercourse between the churches of North and South should
be ruptured and so the integrity of the nation be the more imperiled.
Withal there was a spreading and deepening and most reasonable disgust
at the reckless ranting of a little knot of antislavery men having their
headquarters at Boston, who, exulting in their irresponsibility,
scattered loosely appeals to men's vindictive passions and filled the
unwilling air with clamors against church and ministry and Bible and law
and government, denounced as "pro-slavery" all who declined to accept
their measures or their persons, and, arrogating to themselves
exclusively the name of abolitionist, made that name, so long a title of
honor, to be universally odious.[282:2]

These various factors of public opinion were actively manipulated.
Political parties competed for the southern