ieted by education. There remained an
unconfessed consciousness that the system of bondage was wrong, and a
restless memory that it was at variance with the true American
tradition; its safety was therefore to be secured by political
organization. The generation that made the Constitution took care for
the predominance of freedom in Congress by the ordinance of Jefferson;
the new school aspired to secure for slavery an equality of votes in
the Senate, and, while it hinted at an organic act that should concede
to the collective South a veto power on national legislation, it
assumed that each State separately had the right to revise and nullify
laws of the United States, according to the discretion of its judgment.

The new theory hung as a bias on the foreign relations of the country;
there could be no recognition of Hayti, nor even of the American colony
of Liberia; and the world was given to understand that the
establishment of free labor in Cuba would be a reason for wresting that
island from Spain. Territories were annexed--Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
half of Mexico; slavery must have its share in them all, and it
accepted for a time a dividing line between the unquestioned domain of
free labor and that in which involuntary labor was to be tolerated. A
few years passed away, and the new school, strong and arrogant,
demanded and received an apology for applying the Jefferson proviso to
Oregon.

The application of that proviso was interrupted for three
administrations, but justice moved steadily onward. In the news that
the men of California had chosen freedom, Calhoun heard the knell of
parting slavery, and on his death-bed he counselled secession.
Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison had died despairing of the
abolition of slavery; Calhoun died in despair at the growth of freedom.
His system rushed irresistibly to its natural development. The
death-struggle for California was followed by a short truce; but the
new school of politicians, who said that slavery was not evil, but
good, soon sought to recover the ground they had lost, and, confident
of securing Kansas, they demanded that the established line in the
Territories between freedom and slavery should be blotted out. The
country, believing in the strength and enterprise and expansive energy
of freedom, made answer, though reluctantly: "Be it so; let there be no
strife between brethren; let freedom and slavery compete for the
Territories on equal terms, in a f