man freedom and progression, it began by
blushing for its hideous aspect and uttering feeble and deprecative
apologies. Not that it was at bottom ashamed of its existence, for
slavery, like despotism of all sorts, is characteristically
self-confident and proud; but because it had been allowed to grow up
under protest in the midst of free institutions, and among a people
conscious of the incongruity of the relationship existing between them
and it; and had so contracted the habit of apology, and the hypocritical
profession of regret for its own inherent wrongfulness. Provoked,
however, to try its strength against the feeble assaults of the new
friends of freedom, finding all its demands readily yielded to, and
itself victorious in every conflict, it soon threw off its false
professions of modesty, pronounced itself free from every taint of
wrong-doing, claimed to be the very corner stone and basis of free
institutions themselves, the condition _sine qua non_ of all successful
experiment in republican and democratic organizations, and became boldly
and openly the assailant and propagandist, instead of occupying any
longer the position of defence. Then followed the various attempts to
overthrow and extinguish free speech in the capital of the nation by the
use of the bludgeon, to extend slavery by illegal and bloodthirsty means
over the soil of Kansas, to strengthen the enactments of the fugitive
slave law by new and more offensive provisions, and to cause the
authority of the Slave Power to be openly and confessedly recognized
throughout the whole land, as it had been for years secretly and warily
predominant. The opposition to these measures of aggression ceased to be
wholly confined to the mere handful of technical abolitionists, and to
spread and to take possession of the minds of the whole people, exciting
surprise and alarm, and arousing them to some slight efforts at
resistance. With this rising tendency to resist arose in like measure
the tendency of the slaveholding power to invade. The alternative was
quietly but resolutely chosen in the minds of the leading politicians
of the South to 'rule or ruin.' Preparation was made for retaining the
absolute control of the General Government at Washington, and for
extending the influence of the peculiar institution over the whole North
and all adjacent countries, so long as that policy should prove
practicable; and, if by any contingency defeated in it, to break up the
Unio