monstrous inversion of social phenomena which the Southern
mind accepted at the hands of their leading men, and conceived to be
possible in this advanced age of the world. Seizing upon a system
compatible only with the earliest steps in the progress of man, and
suitable only to the moral sentiments and unenlightened ideas of the
most backward races of the world, they undertook to naturalize and
establish it--nay, to perpetuate it, and to build up society on its
basis--in the nineteenth century, and among the people of one of the
freest and most enlightened nations! Evidently, this was a monstrous
perversion of intellect--a blindness and madness scarcely finding a
parallel in history. It was expected, too, that this anomalous social
proceeding--this backward march of civilization on this continent--would
excite no animadversion and arouse no antagonism in the opposite
section. It involved the reopening of the slave trade, and it was
expected that foreign nations would abate their opposition, lower their
flags, and suffer the new empire, founded on 'the corner stone of
slavery,' to march forward in triumph and achieve its splendid destiny.

These moral and social ideas might have had greater scope to work out
their natural results, had not the political connections between the
North and the South implicated the two sections, alike, in the
consequences of any error or folly on the part of either. Taxation and
representation, and the surrender of fugitive slaves, all provided for
in the Constitution, were the points in which the opposite polities came
into contact in the ordinary workings of the Federal Government.
Perpetual conflicts necessarily arose. But it was chiefly on the
question of territorial extension, and in the formation of new States,
that the most inveterate of all the contests were engendered. The
constitutional provisions applicable to these questions are not without
some obscurity, and this afforded a plausible opportunity for all the
impracticable subtleties arising out of the doctrine of strict
construction. From the time of the admission of Missouri, in 1820, down
to the recent controversy about Kansas, the territorial question was
unsettled, and never failed to be the cause of terrible agitation.

But the march of events soon superseded the question; and even while the
contest was fiercest and most bitter, the silent operation of general
causes was sweeping away the whole ground of dispute. The growth