obligations, could not escheat them of their claims under the
Constitution, and that slaveholders in rebellion had alone among
mortals the privilege of having their cake and eating it at the same
time,--the enemies of free government were striving to persuade the
people that the war was an Abolition crusade. To rebel without
reason was proclaimed as one of the rights of man, while it was
carefully kept out of sight that to suppress rebellion is the first duty
of government. All the evils that have come upon the country have
been attributed to the Abolitionists, though it is hard to see how any
party can become permanently powerful except in one of two ways,
either by the greater truth of its principles, or the extravagance of
the party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, riding safe at
her constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge kraken of
Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and grasping it with
slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history of the matter with
the eyes of Pontoppidan.(1) To believe that the leaders in the
Southern treason feared any danger from Abolitionism, would be to
deny them ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubt
that they made use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears of
their deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought
slavery weak, but because they believed it strong enough, not to
overthrow the government, but to get possession of it; for it
becomes daily clearer that they used rebellion only as a means of
revolution, and if they got revolution, though not in the shape they
looked for, is the American people to save them from its
consequences at the cost of its own existence? The election of Mr.
Lincoln, which it was clearly in their power to prevent had they
wished, was the occasion merely, and not the cause of their revolt.
Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy of a
few earnest persons, without political weight enough to carry the