vote. Commercial houses
competed for southern business. Religious sects, parties, and societies
were emulous in conciliating southern adhesions or contributions and
averting schisms. The condition of success in any of these cases was
well understood to be concession, or at least silence, on the subject of
slavery. The pressure of motives, some of which were honorable and
generous, was everywhere, like the pressure of the atmosphere. It was
not strange that there should be defections from righteousness. Even the
enormous effrontery of the slave power in demanding for its own security
that the rule of tyrannous law and mob violence by which freedom of
speech and of the press had been extinguished at the South should be
extended over the so-called free States did not fail of finding citizens
of reputable standing so base as to give the demand their countenance,
their public advocacy, and even their personal assistance. As the
subject emerged from time to time in the religious community, the
questions arising were often confused and embarrassed by false issues
and illogical statements, and the state of opinion was continually
misrepresented through the incurable habit of the over-zealous in
denouncing as "pro-slavery" those who dissented from their favorite
formulas. But after all deductions, the historian who shall by and by
review this period with the advantage of a longer perspective will be
compelled to record not a few lamentable defections, both individual and
corporate, from the cause of freedom, justice, and humanity. And,
nevertheless, that later record will also show that while the southern
church had been terrified into "an unexampled unanimity" in renouncing
the principles which it had unanimously held, and while like causes had
wrought potently upon northern sentiment, it was the steadfast fidelity
of the Christian people that saved the nation from ruin. At the end of
thirty years from the time when the soil of Missouri was devoted to
slavery the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill" was proposed, which should open for
the extension of slavery the vast expanse of national territory which,
by the stipulation of the "Missouri Compromise," had been forever
consecrated to freedom. The issue of the extension of slavery was
presented to the people in its simplicity. The action of the clergy of
New England was prompt, spontaneous, emphatic, and practically
unanimous. Their memorial, with three thousand and fifty signatures,
protested