Page:Doctrine of State Rights.djvu/13

 but he sat in the Senate silent under the challenge of Mr. Douglas, and allowed the language of Mr. Phillips to go for what it was worth.

For the first time in the history of the country a sectional candidate for the Presidency had been elected. A majority of the Presidents had been Southern men, but none of them had been elected as such. They had always been nominated by a party coextensive with the Union, and voted for in all the States; but Mr. Lincoln had been put forth on purely sectional grounds and did not receive a single Southern vote. He had announced that the Union could not continue to exist half slave and half free. What then? Was the Union to be dissolved? Was slavery to be introduced into the Northern or to be abolished in the Southern States? The declaration was an offence against the Constitution, and neither branch of the proposition could be executed without a palpable violation of it. Many of the States had passed what were called personal-liberty laws, in direct violation of the constitutional obligation to return fugitives held to service or labor under the laws of another State, which Mr. Webster in his great oration in Virginia said, if persisted in, would be destructive to the compact of Union.

The right of the South equally with the people of other sections to occupy, with every species of property known to any State, the common territory of the United States, was denied by the North, under the specious and wholly untenable plea that to take slaves to the territories would be the extension of slavery. Though the argument was upon a false basis, it served the purpose of inflaming the Northern mind. At the South the proposition to forbid a citizen who should migrate to the common territory of the United States from taking his slave with him was considered an offensive and unjust denial of equality in the Union, and as such, but not because of any money interest in the question, an intense excitement was created by it.

The serious troubles in Kansas were followed by the double-dyed crime of John Brown's invasion of Virginia. He came fresh from the Kansas school, and was fulfilling Mr. Seward's prophecy that abolitionism would invade the South. Though the avowed purpose of the invasion was to disturb domestic tranquillity, which it was one of the proclaimed objects of the Union to secure, arson and murder were its