Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/338

300 Mr. Lincoln attached to his own words. Mr. Douglas charged that utterances of this character made Mr. Lincoln &quot;an enemy of the Union and an advocate of an internecine conflict in which the Free States and the Slave States should wrestle in deadly encounter. The general impression on the Northern mind made by these sayings of Mr. Lincoln was that slavery must be destroyed. The Southern impression was that it would be the policy of the new sectional party to remove by law or by force the obstruction to harmonious Union which slavery presented. There was another distinct impression that unless slavery could be prevented in all the territories, and then abolished in all the States, the Union must be divided into halves by some movement. If the new party fail to destroy slavery, then the States without slaves must separate from the States with slaves. If it should come into power to carry out its platform, secession by the Southern States might be attempted. The Union &quot;cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.&quot; Mr. Douglas insisted with great force that this declaration meant disunion.

Following this turgid current to its debouch in disunion, we see a new move in 1859 designed to make sectional agitation effective in the approaching political battle of 1860.

A small book, called by some &quot;a document&quot; prepared by a former citizen of North Carolina, Hinton Rowan Helper, which contained an arraignment of the class of Southern slave owners then living in the United States in coarse and slanderous language, was published. The South was threatened in the document with &quot;confiscation, servile insurrections, invasion and maneuver.&quot; The inhuman book has long since gone to its own place justly consigned to everlasting shame and contempt, but when it appeared in this excited period of frenzied partyism it met an astounding welcome from many of the most eminent and virtuous people of the North. It was taken in hand as a