ossibly, from the very beginning, of inferior natural endowment, on
whom they proposed to confer the same rights without any probation
whatsoever. A glance at the world around them should have induced
reflection. The experience of other countries was not encouraging.
Hayti, where the blacks had long been masters of the soil, was still
a pandemonium; and in Jamaica and South Africa the precipitate action
of zealous but unpractical philanthropists had wrought incalculable
mischief. Even Lincoln himself, redemption by purchase being
impracticable, saw no other way out of the difficulty than the
wholesale deportation of the negroes to West Africa.

In time, perhaps, under the influence of such men as Lincoln and Lee,
the nation might have found a solution of the problem, and North and
South have combined to rid their common country of the curse of human
servitude. But between fanaticism on the one side and helplessness on
the other there was no common ground. The fierce invectives of the
reformers forbade all hope of temperate discussion, and their
unreasoning denunciations only provoked resentment. And this
resentment became the more bitter because in demanding emancipation,
either by fair means or forcible, and in expressing their intention
of making it a national question, the abolitionists were directly
striking at a right which the people of the South held sacred.

It had never been questioned, hitherto, that the several States of
the Union, so far at least as concerned their domestic institutions,
were each and all of them, under the Constitution, absolutely
self-governing. But the threats which the Black Republicans held out
were tantamount to a proposal to set the Constitution aside. It was
their charter of liberty, therefore, and not only their material
prosperity, which the States that first seceded believed to be
endangered by Lincoln's election. Ignorant of the temper of the great
mass of the Northern people, as loyal in reality to the Constitution
as themselves, they were only too ready to be convinced that the
denunciations of the abolitionists were the first presage of the
storm that was presently to overwhelm them, to reduce their States to
provinces, to wrest from them the freedom they had inherited, and to
make them hewers of wood and drawers of water to the detested
plutocrats of New England.

But the gravamen of the indictment against the Southern people is not
that they seceded, but that they seceded