termined to seize on and control all the resources
of the Federal Government, and to spread their institutions through new
States and Territories until the balance of power should fall into their
hands and they should be able to force slavery into all the Free States.

A leading Southern senator boasted that he would yet call the roll of
his slaves on Bunker Hill; and, for a while, the political successes of
the Slave Power were such as to suggest to New England that this was no
impossible event.

They repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had hitherto stood,
like the Chinese wall, between our Northwestern Territories and the
irruptions of slaveholding barbarians.

Then came the struggle between Freedom and Slavery in the new
Territory,--the battle for Kansas and Nebraska, fought with fire and
sword and blood, where a race of men, of whom John Brown was the
immortal type, acted over again the courage, the perseverance, and the
military religious ardor of the old Covenanters of Scotland, and, like
them, redeemed the Ark of Liberty at the price of their own blood and
blood dearer than their own.

The time of the Presidential canvass which elected Mr. Lincoln was the
crisis of this great battle. The conflict had become narrowed down to
the one point of the extension of slave-territory. If the slaveholders
could get States enough, they could control and rule; if they were
outnumbered by Free States, their institutions, by the very law of
their nature, would die of suffocation. Therefore, Fugitive-Slave Law,
District of Columbia, Inter-State Slave-Trade, and what not, were all
thrown out of sight for a grand rally on this vital point. A President
was elected pledged to opposition to this one thing alone,--a man known
to be in favor of the Fugitive-Slave Law and other so-called compromises
of the Constitution, but honest and faithful in his determination on
this one subject. That this was indeed the vital point was shown by the
result. The moment Lincoln's election was ascertained, the slaveholders
resolved to destroy the Union they could no longer control.

They met and organized a Confederacy which they openly declared to be
the first republic founded on the right and determination of the white
man to enslave the black man, and, spreading their banners, declared
themselves to the Christian world of the nineteenth century as a nation
organized with the full purpose and intent of perpetuating slavery.

But in the cour