rritories and into a fixed purpose to confine it within
its then existing limits. But to put immovable bounds to the territorial
expansion of the slave industrial system was virtually, under the
circumstance, to provide for its decline and ultimate extinction, for the
beginning of a period of actual and inhibited non-extension of slavery as
a rival system of labor in the Union would mark the termination of its
period of growth and the commencement of its industrial decay. The peril
of the slave system was certainly extreme, and the dread of the slave
power was not less so.

The national situation was full of gloom and menace to the industrial
rivals. For the passions of the slave power were taking on an ominously
violent and reckless energy of expression, which, unless all signs fail,
would take on presently a no less violent and reckless energy of action.
The crisis was intensified, first, by the repeal on the part of certain
free States of their slave-sojournment laws; second, by the extraordinary
activity of the underground railroad; third, by increasing opposition in
the North to the execution of the Fugitive Slave law, all of which, acting
together, seriously impaired the value and security of slave property in
the Union; fourth, by that fierce, obstinate, but futile, struggle of the
South to obtain possession of Kansas, and the exposure thereby of its
marked inferiority as a colonizer in competition with modern
industrialism; fifth, by the growing influence of the abolition movement,
and, sixth, by those nameless terrors of slave insurrections, which were
evoked by the apparition of John Brown at Harper's Ferry. This acute
situation was finally rendered intolerable to the slave power upon the
election of Abraham Lincoln on a sectional platform, pledged to a policy
of uncompromising resistance to the farther extension of slavery to the
territories. Worsted within the Union, it was natural that the South
should refuse to yield at this point of the conflict, and that it should
make an attempt, as a dernier resort, to secede from it with its peculiar
institution for the purpose of continuing the battle for its existence
outside of a political system in which it had been overborne and hemmed in
upon itself by modern industrialism and so doomed by that inexorable force
to slow but absolutely certain extinction.

But the Union, which had developed such deadly industrial peril to the
South, had created for the North its i