in the Constitution to which allusion has been made, and being lovers of that great charter of their liberties, they yielded to it a wilding obedience, even with this most distasteful and contradictory interpretation. There were none in the north to suggest interference with the hated institution where it existed, save a small band of abolitionists. But there was violent opposition, and insuperable repugnance to extending slavery into the free territories of the Union. Occasional struggles on the subject of extension, and a trial of the power of the respective theories, had been carried on with great bitterness for many years. The slave propagandists had long been quietly feeling their way, laying all their plans with one intent, and waiting only opportunity and sufficient strength to burst forth with irresistible fury, and establish a great slave empire in the face, and to the astonishment of, the civilized world.

"This is what the slaveholders have demanded. They said that the Constitution favored freedom,-free speech, a free press, free labor, free soil, and free men, and demanded that the Constitution should be changed, to maintain the exclusive claims of an aristocratic class, and to strengthen their hold upon their slaves. The one incessant cry has been, Abjure your democratic constitution, which favors equal rights for all men, and give us, in its place, an aristocratic constitution, which will secure the rights of a privileged class.' They insisted that the domestic slave trade should be nurtured, and the foreign slave trade opened; saying, in the coarse and vulgar language of one of the most earnest advocates of slavery, the North can import jackasses from Malta; let the South then import Niggers from Africa.' They demanded the right to extend slavery over all the Territories of the United States, the right to hold their slaves in all States of the Union temporarily; that speaking or writing against slavery in any State in the Union should be a penal offense; that the North should catch their fugitive slaves, and send them back to bondage; and that the Administration of the General Government should be placed in the hands of those only whom the South could trust, as the pledged enemies of republican equality, and the friends of slavery.'

"The reply of the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States was decisive. We will not,' they said, 'thus change the Constitution of our fathers. We will abide by it as it is.' "Then,' replied the slaveholders, we will dash this Union to

pieces. From its fragments we will construct another, whose corner-stone shall be slavery.'

"It will be difficult for future generations to credit the barbarism into which slavery degraded the human heart in the South. In several of the Southern States, laws were enacted declaring that all the free colored people who did not leave the State within a given time, should be sold into slavery. And how are these poor creatures, from Mississippi or Louisiana, to escape their awful doom, the most awful that can befall a mortal,-slavery for themselves and their offspring, forever? Here is a little family, perhaps a Christian family, with but a slight admixture of African blood in their veins. They are poor, friendless, uninstructed. They must run the gauntlet of the Slave States, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, where they are every moment liable to be arrested as fugitives, thrown into prison, and after being kept there for a few months, and no one appearing to claim them, they are to be sold as slaves, the proceeds of the sale to be cast into the public treasury. Can tyranny perpetrate a more atrocious crime? And what is the excuse for this outrage so unparalleled in the legislation of Christendom? It is simply that the enslaving of the free is necessary to enable the slaveholders to keep in subjection those already in bondage. In view of this execrable system of despotism, Thomas Jefferson says,

"What an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself in vindication of his own liberty; and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow man a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."

In order to secure a full equality, or balance of power, for the handful of slaveholders in the United States, Senator Hunter of Virginia demanded that there should be "two Presidents chosen, one by the slaveholding South, and the other by the North, and that no act should be valid unless approved by both Presidents. The number of slaveholders in the United States did not exceed three hundred thousand. The whole population of the country was about thirty millions. The whole population of the South was but about eight millions. Vast'multitudes of these were poor whites, who could neither read nor write, and were in beggarly poverty. These ignorant creatures were almost entirely at the beck of the slaveholders. Thus this amendment to the constitu

tion was designed to give three hundred thousand slaveholders a veto upon all the acts of the General Government. In the further carrying out of this plan, he demanded that the United States Supreme Court should consist of ten members, five to be chosen by the little band of slaveholders, and the other half by the millions of freemen."

The slaveholders also demanded that their slaves, who, feeling the inate desire for freedom planted in the human breast, escaped to the free air of the colder North, should be seized by the citizens of the North, who abhorred the institution, and returned to eternal bondage, a thousand times worse than death. They were to pursue them with the whole community, if necessary, that they might thus be returned to torture. Many sad instances of this occurred, harrowing the conscientious mind of the whole north. In the entire South no man with Northern thoughts of freedom, was safe for a moment, in life, or property. There was nothing

so sacred that a slaveholder was bound to regard, if a fellowcitizen thought, in his inmost heart a word against the monstrous demands of slavery. Stripes, lynching and death were the only reward for a free thought, in this regard.

"Future ages will find it almost impossible to believe that any eulightened man could be found, in America, to defend a system inevitably involving such atrocities. And yet it is a marvelous fact, that slavery found no more determined supporters than among the so-called Christian ministers of the South; and the women surpassed the men in the bitter and unrelenting spirit with which they clung to the institution. Those facts which harrowed the soul of the North, seem to have excited not an emotion in the heart of the slaveholding South. These Christian ministers took the ground, that Slavery was a divine institution. The Rev. Dr. Palmer, of New Orleans, one of the most distinguished of the Presbyterian clergymen of the South, declared it to be the especial mission of the Southern churches, 'to preserve and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.'

"The professedly Christian minister who uttered these sentiments, was familiar with all the atrocities of slavery. The slave shambles, where men, women and children were sold at auction, were ever open, almost beneath the shadow of his church spire. Maidens, who had professed the name of Christ, and whose mark

or cows.

et value depended upon their beauty, were sold to the highest bidder within sound of his church choir. Families were sold in the slave market of New Orleans, parents and children, husbands and wives separated, just as mercilessly as if they were sheep or And yet the Christianity of the South had become so degenerate, through the influence of slavery, that a Presbyterian minister, and sustained apparently by his whole church, represents the institution as one of divine approval, and one which it is the principal mission of the Southern church to maintain and extend.” The Hon. A. H. Stevens, of Georgia, vice-President of the Confederacy, said, in a speech made at Savannah, March, 1861:—

"The prevailing ideas entertained by Jefferson, and most of the leading Statesmen, at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature: that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. Those ideas were, however, fundamentally wrong. Our new government is founded on exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural condition. Our Confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone, which was rejected by the first builders, is become the chief-stone of the corner in our new edifice.""

Such is a very imperfect statement of some of the prominent aspects and demands of the wicked institution of slavery. It poisoned the life blood of its supporters, and eradicated from their hearts every vestige of morality and religion. It not only did this for its advocates, but it demanded that the pure and untainted, the legions of the free North, should become the lovers and defenders of the hateful and baleful institution, and become more meanly the slaves of the aristocrats of this "curse of God," than the ignorant, "dirt-eating poor whites," and the chattels over whom they held supreme sway. Of course, educated, intelligent, conscientious men would not submit to this, and hence arose the inevitable conflict.

The celebrated writer, Rev. John S. C. Abbott, in discussing this subject, has so tersely summed up the remaining causes which made the rebellion inevitable, in his admirable "History of the Civil War in America," that it is here inserted, as being better

than any account the author can furnish within the limits of this work:

"By one of the compromises of the Constitution which slavery had exacted, and which, instead of being a compromise, was a bald concession, the slaves of the South, though deemed there merely as property, were allowed to be counted in the Congressional representation, five slaves being equivalent to three white men. Thus, John Jacob Astor, with a property of twenty millions at the North, had but one vote. But the Southern planter had his property represented in Congress. The slaveholder, with 800 slaves, valued at less than one million, was equal in his representation in Congress to 480 free Northerners. He held in his own hand the votes of these 480 men, who, in his own view, and so far as the rights of freemen are concerned, were no more men than the horses and the oxen in Northern barns.

"The North felt the humiliation of this arrangement, and yet were not at all disposed to disturb it. They would abide by the Constitution. But they were unalterably resolved that such an arrangement should not extend any further. The practical operation of this "compromise" was this. The six slaveholding Gulf States, by the census of 1860, contained 2,311,260 free white citizens. The single Free State of Ohio contained 2,339,599 citizens. And yet Ohio could send but eighteen representatives to Congress, while the slaveholders could send twenty-eight. In addition to all this, the slaveholders of these States were represented by twelve Senators, while the free citizens of Ohio were represented but by two. And yet the energies of freedom so infinitely surpass those of slavery, that the free North was perfectly willing to abide by these "compromises" of the Constitution, being fully conscious that, even with all these advantages in favor of slavery, freedom would eventually win the day.

"The slaveholders were equally conscious of the fact. They saw the tide of free emigration rolling rapidly over the prairies of the West, and new States carved our with almost miraculous rapidity. It was evident that, under the natural workings of the Constitution, the votes of freemen would soon entirely outnumber those of a privileged and aristocratic class, and therefore they resolved to dissolve the Union, break up the Constitution, and reconstruct the Government upon a basis which should continue the power they had so long exercised, in their own hands.