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Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of the
danger and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuade
himself of Union majorities at the South, and to carry on a war that
was half peace in the hope of a peace that would have been all war,-
-while he was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, under some
theory that Secession, however it might absolve States from their
obligations, could not escheat them of their claims under the
Constitution, and that slaveholders in rebellion had alone among
mortals the privilege of having their cake and eating it at the same
time,--the enemies of free government were striving to persuade the
people that the war was an Abolition crusade. To rebel without
reason was proclaimed as one of the rights of man, while it was
carefully kept out of sight that to suppress rebellion is the first duty
of government. All the evils that have come upon the country have
been attributed to the Abolitionists, though it is hard to see how any
party can become permanently powerful except in one of two ways,
either by the greater truth of its principles, or the extravagance of
the party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, riding safe at
her constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge kraken of
Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and grasping it with
slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history of the matter with
the eyes of Pontoppidan.[8] To believe that the leaders in the
Southern treason feared any danger from Abolitionism, would be to
deny them ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubt
that they made use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears of
their deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought
slavery weak, but because they believed it strong enough, not to
overthrow the government, but to get possession of it; for it
becomes daily clearer that they used rebellion only as a means of
revolution, and if they got revolution, though not in the shape they
looked for, is the American people to save them from its
consequences at the cost of its own existence? The election of Mr.
Lincoln, which it was clearly in their power to prevent had they
wished, was the occasion merely, and not the cause of their revolt.
Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy of a
few earnest persons, without political weight enough to carry the
election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle was
disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the
position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great
effects do not follow from small causes,--that is, disproportionately
small,--but from adequate causes acting under certain required
conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent
acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box,
may serve for a child's wonder; but the real miracle lies in that
divine league which bound all the forces of nature to the service of
the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at work
for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison and
Phillips have been far less successful propagandists than the
slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance of
their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the
question upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by
defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But,
even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on
the part of the North to commit aggressions, though there was a
growing determination to resist them. The popular unanimity in
favor of the war three years ago was but in small measure the result
of anti-slavery sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But
every month of the war, every movement of the allies of slavery in
the Free States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand.
The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little moved
by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until those principles
are interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of some
infringement upon their own rights, and then their instincts and
passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable
reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas,
those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force till
they are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or
imminent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin to fight
against Sisera. Had any one doubted before that the rights of
human nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world
over, no matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one
failed to see what the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts of
the advocates of slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon
the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence and the
radical doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharpen his eyes.
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