a sin against God. The Southern States
where slavery existed defended the institution without shame and
without fear. They bitterly resented any discussion of the subject by
the North, and they took effectual means to suppress any adverse
opinions in the South.

In the very year of Garfield's election, nearly a thousand white
persons in the slave States were robbed, whipped, imprisoned, tarred
and feathered, or murdered, on suspicion of sympathy with the slaves.

New and bitter laws were passed in the Southern States against teaching
or helping the negroes; and in several States it was calmly proposed to
deprive the free blacks also of their liberty, to sell them back into
bondage in order to raise money for the support of the elementary
schools. In defiance of the laws of the Federal Government, the slave
trade also was reintroduced, and negroes stolen from the West Coast of
Africa were once more landed and sold into slavery.

[Illustration: Negroes stolen from the west coast of Africa were sold
into slavery.]

This open and insolent growth of the spirit of slavery in the South was
slowly rousing the rest of the great nation from its slumber.
Statesmen had been silent too long, politicians and preachers had
apologised for the evil, and the people as a whole had given no sign,
until provoked by those flagrant attempts to carry the vile system into
those newer parts of the country called Territories, vast districts of
only partly occupied land which had not yet been erected into States.

Then the controversy became sharp and bitter, and the men of the North
began to speak out. To the younger men especially was the system
hateful, and it was plain that in the free States a new generation had
risen up which was prepared to wash its hands of the curse of slavery.
Some of the Southern States, afterwards known as the Confederates,
formed themselves into an association, and threatened to withdraw from
the Federal Union; and civil war between the slave States and the free
was by the more thoughtful and far-seeing deemed inevitable.

The young Senator Garfield was one of the first to realise the true
position of affairs. During his first year in the State Senate he had
made his mark, in the next he became by the mere force of his character
and the intensity of his feelings its leader.

The President of the United States at the time was James Buchanan, a
Democrat and a friend of the slave-owners. He, with others in