ss.

But to the resume of this rapid statement of momentous events:
Meanwhile, the slave, patient in his longings, prayed for deliverance.
Truly has it been said by Elihu Burrit that "you may take a man and yoke
him to your labor as you yoke the ox that worketh to live, and liveth to
work; you may surround him with ignorance and cloud him over with
artificial night. You may do this and all else that will degrade him as
a man, without injuring his value as a slave; yet the idea that he was
born to be free will survive it all. 'Tis allied to his hope of
immortality--the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot
reach. 'Tis the torch lit up in his soul by the omnipotent hand of Deity
Himself." The true and tried hosts of freedom, represented and led by
Garrison, Douglass, Lovejoy, Phillips, Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
and Frances Ellen Harper, and others--few compared to the indifferent
and avowed defenders of slavery, welcoming outrage and ostracism, by pen
and on forum, from hilltop and valley, proclaimed emancipation as the
right of the slave and the duty of the master. The many heroic efforts
of the anti-slavery phalanx were not without effect, and determined
resistance was made to the admission of more slave territory which was
in accordance with the "Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the Northwest.
Slavery controlled the Government from its commencement, hence its
supporters looked with alarm upon an increasing determination to stay
its progress.

California had been admitted as a free State, after a struggle the most
severe. Its admission John C. Calhoun, the very able leader of the slave
power, regarded as the death-knell of slavery, if the institution
remained within the union and counseled secession. Washington,
Jefferson, and Madison, in despair at the growth of slavery; Calhoun at
that of freedom. But how could this march of moral progress and national
greatness be arrested? Congress had, in 1787, enacted that all the
territory not then States should forever be reserved to freedom. The
slave power saw the "handwriting on the wall" surround it with a cordon
of free States; increase their representatives in Congress advocating
freedom, and slavery is doomed. The line cherished by the founders, the
Gibraltar against which slavery had dashed its angry billows, must be
blotted out, and over every rod of virgin soil it was to be admitted
without let or hindrance.

Then came the dark days of compromise,