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? How, at least, could the
South have escaped slavery any time during these last thirty years?
And is it, moreover, so certain that slavery is an unmitigated evil,
opposed to God's will, and producing all the sorrows which have ever
been produced by tyranny and wrong? It is here, after all, that one
comes to the difficult question. Here is the knot which the fingers
of men cannot open, and which admits of no sudden cutting with the
knife.
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