doubt, was the sincere sentiment of the majority in the North, against
interference with slavery in the existing slave States. I have tried to
allow to this sentiment what weight it deserves, in saying that the
North '_obscurely and reluctantly_ felt a revision of the Constitution
essential to the national welfare.' But my view is that whatever they
said, and whatever, on the surface of their minds, they thought, the
people of the North knew, even if they denied it to themselves, that
chattel slavery was impossible in the modern world; and furthermore that
the people of the South were justified in that instinct which told them
that the institution, fatally menaced, was to be saved only by
secession. The kernel of the matter, to my thinking, lay in the fugitive
slave question. The provision of the Constitution for the return of
fugitive slaves, though it may seem a matter of detail, was, I think, in
reality the keystone of the arch. Make it inoperative, and the
institution was doomed. Now many of the Northern States, by 'personal
liberty laws' and the like, had long been picking at that keystone.
Whatever were the professions of politicians and people as to
non-interference, they shrank from the logical corollary, which would
have been the sincere, whole-hearted and cheerful carrying out of
Article IV., Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution. They were even,
I think, logically bound to accept loyally the Dred Scott decision,
which was absolutely constitutional. To protest against it, to seek to
evade it, was to insist on a revision of the Constitution. But it was
inconceivable that a civilised community, not blinded by local Southern
prejudice, could loyally accept the Dred Scott decision, or could
cheerfully assist the Southern slaveholder to capture and carry off from
their own hearthstones, as it were, his runaway chattel. Therefore, the
position and the protestations of the North were mutually contradictory.
It was a case of trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds;
and the North was bound to the hare by fundamental considerations of