the
extraordinary policy of the Southern leaders. It is not improbable that
they will henceforward acknowledge such to have been the motive of their
principal political acts for many years past. The terrible events now
passing before our saddened eyes, are too solemn and weighty, not to be
understood in all their past relations and in all their present import.
They stand forth in stern and awful reality, glaring in the lurid light
of the past and casting dark shadows over the future, while they sweep
away all false pretences, and lay bare the real motives which, from the
beginning, have actuated the men who are prominent in performing the
great drama.

But these questions of transient passions and objurgatory provocation
are trivial and unimportant. They do not touch the real causes of the
difficulty; they are but the froth on the surface of the deep and mighty
current of events, which was rushing on to the gulf of rebellion. The
time had come, in the history of our country, when, by the necessary
working of its institutions, the most solemn question of the age was to
be determined. Slavery must either accept its inevitable doom and
prepare for ultimate extinction, or it must provide new means for
prolonging its existence and reestablishing its waning power. In three
quarters of a century, the Constitution of 1787 had done its work. It
had suppressed the immigration of Africans; it had established that of
Europeans. Free white labor had demonstrated its superiority and
achieved a complete victory over slavery; and the political power, long
wielded by the Southern men, had passed forever out of their hands, as
the representatives and supporters of the slave policy. In the Senate,
in the House of Representatives, in the great majority of States, in all
the Territories, and, finally, in the very citadel of their former
power, the presidential mansion, their almost immemorial superiority had
been utterly overthrown. The Government was about to assume its true
character, as the home of liberty and the veritable asylum of humanity.
Slavery, fallen into the minority, was about to experience an
accelerated decline and eventually to disappear. To resist this doom,
was to fight against the Constitution and against destiny.

The people of the Southern States were wholly unwilling to accept the
condition to which the legitimate workings of the Constitution had
fairly brought them. Being a minority in numbers and in representative