e another. You think yours is the best
for you, and we think that ours is the best for us. But our culture is
exhausting, and we must have new lands. One part of your people say
that Congress shall exclude slavery from the territories, and another
set of men say that it will be excluded by natural laws. Under either
theory, somebody must go, and if we can't go with our slaves, we must
go without them and our country will be given up to the negroes."

With the system of slavery, and in the absence of knowledge of the
value of manufactured fertilizers, this was not an unreasonable view.
Looking forward a hundred years and assuming the continued existence
of slavery, there was no conclusive solution of the problem presented
by Mr. Seddon. But he did not seem to consider that he was warring
against nature as well as against the Union in his attempt to extend
the area of slavery. His efforts, had they been successful, could
only have postponed the crisis for a period not definite, but surely
not of long duration. When the Confederacy was formed, Mr. Seddon
became Secretary of War, and when the war was over, I recognized his
friendship by securing the removal of his disabilities under the
Fourteenth Amendment. Of the Secessionists, Mr. Seddon was the
leading man upon the floor of the convention. It was manifest that he
did not wish to secure the return of the seceded States. On one
point he was anxious, and he did not attempt to disguise his purpose.
He sought to secure from the convention, or if not from the convention,
from the delegates from the Republican States, an assurance that in no
event should there be war. One of the errors, indeed, the greatest
error, was the failure of the Northern delegates to assert that in no
event should the Union be dissolved except through the success of the
South in arms. As far as I remember, this was not asserted by any one
except myself.

Many expressed their fear of war and urged the convention to agree to
some plan of settlement as the only means of averting war. Mr.
Stockton, of New Jersey, went so far as to assert that in case of war
the North would raise a regiment to aid the South as often as one was
raised to assail it. Mr. Chase's remarks on the floor of the
convention indicated a disposition to allow the South to go without
resistance on our part, and in a conversation that I had with him as
we walked one evening on Pennsylvania Avenue, toward Georgetown, he
sai