Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/347

Rh secession; and it may be said that, when eleven years later secession came, in a certain sense they had such support. But it is nevertheless true that, when the governments of Great Britain and France were inclined to recognize the Southern Confederacy as an independent power, it was the abhorrence of slavery prevailing among civilized mankind, their own people included, more than any other influence, that restrained them, and kept the Southern Confederacy in its fatal isolation.

The debate which followed called forth all the great men of the Senate. On March 4 Calhoun appeared, gaunt and haggard, too ill to speak, but still full of that grim energy with which he had been for so many years defending the interests of slavery, calling them the rights of the South. His oration was read to the Senate by Mason of Virginia. Calhoun's mind was narrow, but within its narrow sphere acute. He saw with perfect clearness that slavery could not be saved within the Union, and that every compromise putting off the decisive crisis only made its final doom all the more certain. A year or two before, he had written to a member of the Alabama legislature that, instead of shunning the issue with the North on the slavery question, it should be courted. “I would go even one step farther,” he wrote, “and add that it is our duty to force the issue on the North. We are now stronger than we shall be hereafter, politically and morally. Unless we bring on the issue, delay to us will be dangerous indeed.