crisis. For many months, the gigantic struggle then imminent, had been
painfully discernible to far-seeing men. In 1858, Lincoln had forewarned
the country in his "House Divided" speech. As early as the beginning of
the year 1860 the Union had been plainly in jeopardy. Early in February
of that momentous year, Jefferson Davis, on behalf of the South, had
introduced his famous resolutions in the Senate of the United States.
This document was the ultimatum of the dissatisfied slave-holding
commonwealths. It demanded that Congress should protect slavery
throughout the domain of the United States. The territories, it
declared, were the common property of the states of the Union and hence
open to the citizens of all states with all their personal possessions.
The Northern states, furthermore, were no longer to interfere with the
working of the Fugitive Slave Act. They must repeal their Personal
Liberty laws and respect the Dred Scott Decision of the Federal Supreme
Court. Neither in their own legislatures nor in Congress should they
trespass upon the right of the South to regulate slavery as it best saw
fit.

These resolutions, demanding in effect that slavery be thus safeguarded
- almost to the extent of introducing it into the free states - really
foreshadowed the Democratic platform of 1860 which led to the great
split in that party, the victory of the Republicans under Lincoln, the
subsequent secession of the more radical southern states, and finally
the Civil War, for it was inevitable that the North, when once aroused,
would bitterly resent such pro-slavery demands.

And this great crisis was only the bursting into flame of many smaller
fires that had long been smoldering. For generations the two sections
had been drifting apart. Since the middle of the seventeenth century,
Mason and Dixon's line had been a line of real division separating two