doctrine of immediate emancipation, were of a different character, and
confined to no locality or time. The spirit that produced them developed
itself in every section of the country, and the question continued to
assume vaster proportions, till the Union itself was involved, and what
was first only a conflict between the police of the city and a few hundred
or thousands of ignorant, reckless men, grew at last into the most
gigantic and terrible civil war that ever cursed the earth. The Union was
rent asunder, and State arrayed against State, while the world looked on
aghast at the strange and bloody spectacle. The final result has been the
emancipation of the slaves, and their endowment with all the rights and
privileges of American citizens. But with this has come a frightful
national debt, the destruction of that feeling of common interest and
patriotism, which is the strongest security of a country; a contempt for
the Constitution, the concentration of power in the hands of Congress,
small regard for State rights, while the controlling power in the South
has passed into the hands of an ignorant, incapable, irresponsible class;
and, worse than all, the people have become accustomed to the strange
spectacle, so fraught with danger in a republic, of seeing the
legislatures and executives of sovereign States overawed and overborne by
the national troops. That frightful conflict for the slave has sown
dangerous seed; what the final harvest will be, the future historian alone
will be able to show.

The inconsistency of having a system of slavery incorporated into a
republican government was always felt by good men North and South, as well
as its damaging effect on the social and political well-being of the whole
community; and steps had been taken both in Virginia and Kentucky to do
away with it by legislative action. Whether these incipient steps would
ever have ended in relieving us of the evil, can only be conjectured. We
only know that a peaceable solution of the question was rendered