Chapter the Second

Slavery the Trouble-Maker--Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican--The Key--Sickle's Tragedy--Brooks and Sumner--Life at
Washington in the Fifties



I


Whether the War of Sections--as it should be called, because, except in
Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky
and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war--could have been averted must ever
remain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the institution of
African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate removal, the Federal
Union set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The wiser heads of
the Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonance
to the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; on
the practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growers
and the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon found
slave labor unprofitable and rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the
South, it came to represent in the Southern mind a "right" which the South
was bound to defend.

Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon had once said to him in
answer to his urgency for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy: "I
have talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston and we are both of the
opinion that as long as African slavery exists at the South, France and