create a new government wherein slavery should be
universal and fundamental. Never before had it been proposed to
establish a nation solely to perpetuate human slavery.

The election of Lincoln was already announced as a sufficient cause
for secession. The South had failed to make California slave; to
make four more slave States out of Texas; to secure pledges that
out of the New Mexico Territory other slave States should be formed;
and to make Kansas a slave State. It had also failed to acquire
Cuba, already slave, for division into more slave States. There
was, moreover, a certainly that many more free States would be
admitted from the territorial domain of the great West. The
political equilibrium in Congress on the line of slavery had
therefore become impossible for all the future. These were the
grievances over which the South brooded.

But was it not in the divine plan that slavery in the Republic
should come to a violent end? Nowhere among the kingdoms and
empires of the earth had it become, or had it ever been so deeply
implanted, as a part of a political system. In the proud, boastful,
free Republic of America, in the afternoon of the nineteenth century,
where the Christian religion was taught, where liberty of conscience
was guaranteed by organic law, where civilization was assumed to
exist in its most enlightened and progressive stage, there, _alone_,
the slave owner marshalled boastfully his human slaves, selling
them on the auction block or otherwise at will, to be carried to
distant parts, separating wife and husband, parents and children,
and in a thousand ways shocking all the purer instincts of humanity.

Nor did its evil effects begin or cease with the black slave.

Jefferson, speaking of slavery in the United States when it existed
in a more modified form, described its immoral effect on the master
and his family thus:

"The whole commerce between master and slave is perpetual exercise
of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on
the one part and degrading submission on the other. Our children
see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . The parent storms, the
child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same
airs in the circle of small slaves, gives a loose to the worst of
passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny,
cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities."(101)

The virtue of the white race was necessarily invo