ecipitated for final settlement
by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, by the consequent struggle
for mastery in Kansas, and by the aggressive intervention of the
Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott. These are the events
which led, often slowly, but always with directness, to the political
revolution of 1860. The contest was inevitable, and the men whose
influence developed and encouraged it may charitably be regarded
as the blind agents of fate. But if personal responsibility for
prematurely forcing the conflict belongs to any body of men, it
attaches to those who, in 1854, broke down the adjustments of 1820
and of 1850. If the compromises of those years could not be
maintained, the North believed that all compromise was impossible;
and they prepared for the struggle which this fact foreshadowed.
They had come to believe that the house divided against itself
could not stand; that the Republic half slave, half free, could
not endure. They accepted as their leader the man who proclaimed
these truths. The peaceful revolution was complete when Abraham
Lincoln was chosen President of the United States.

In the closing and more embittered period of the political struggle
over the question of Slavery, public opinion in the South grew
narrow, intolerant, and cruel. The mass of the Southern people
refused to see any thing in the anti-slavery movement except
fanaticism; they classed Abolitionists with the worst of malefactors;
they endeavored to shut out by the criminal code and by personal
violence the enlightened and progressive sentiment of the world.
Their success in arousing the prejudice and unifying the action of
the people in fifteen States against the surging opinion of
Christendom is without parallel. Philanthropic movements elsewhere
were regarded with jealousy and distrust. Southern statesmen of
the highest rank looked upon British emancipation in the West Indies
as designedly hostile to the prosperity and safety of their own
section, and as a plot for the ultimate destruction of the Republic.
Each year the hatred against the North deepened, and the boundary
between the free States and the slave States was becoming as marked
as a line of fire. The South would see no way of dealing with
Slavery except to strengthen and fortify it at every point. Its
extinction they would not contemplate. Even a suggestion for its
amelioration was regarded as dangerous to the safety of the State
and to the sacred