We All Remember That Fight About Kansas, And What Sort Of A
Fight It Was!
Kansas lies alongside of Missouri, a slave State, and
is contiguous to no other State.
If the free-soil party could, in
the days of Pierce and Buchanan, carry the day in Kansas, it is not
likely that they would be beaten on any new ground under such a
President as Lincoln. We have all heard in Europe how Southern men
have ruled in the White House, nearly from the days of Washington
downward; or if not Southern men, Northern men, such as Pierce and
Buchanan, with Southern politics; and therefore we have been taught
to think that the South has been politically the winning party.
They have, in truth, been the losing party as regards national
power. But what they have so lost they have hitherto recovered by
political address and individual statecraft. The leading men of the
South have seen their position, and have gone to their work with the
exercise of all their energies. They organized the Democratic party
so as to include the leaders among the Northern politicians. They
never begrudged to these assistants a full share of the good things
of official life. They have been aided by the fanatical
abolitionism of the North by which the Republican party has been
divided into two sections. It has been fashionable to be a
Democrat, that is, to hold Southern politics, and unfashionable to
be a Republican, or to hold anti-Southern politics. In that way the
South has lived and struggled on against the growing will of the
population; but at last that will became too strong, and when Mr.
Lincoln was elected, the South knew that its day was over.
It is not surprising that the South should have desired secession.
It is not surprising that it should have prepared for it. Since the
days of Mr. Calhoun its leaders have always understood its position
with a fair amount of political accuracy. Its only chance of
political life lay in prolonged ascendency at Washington. The
swelling crowds of Germans, by whom the Western States were being
filled, enlisted themselves to a man in the ranks of abolition.
What was the acquisition of Texas against such hosts as these? An
evil day was coming on the Southern politicians, and it behooved
them to be prepared. As a separate nation - a nation trusting to
cotton, having in their hands, as they imagined, a monopoly of the
staple of English manufacture, with a tariff of their own, and those
rabid curses on the source of all their wealth no longer ringing in
their ears, what might they not do as a separate nation? But as a
part of the Union, they were too weak to hold their own if once
their political finesse should fail them. That day came upon them,
not unexpected, in 1860, and therefore they cut the cable.
And all this has come from slavery. It is hard enough, for how
could the South have escaped slavery?
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