Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 01.djvu/15

Rh which was yet to burst out in flames and consume the house with the fire whose initial spark he consented to bear and apply to the family dwelling, ever nursing the fire until the building was fairly ablaze. And what was now, in 1860, the worth of the reliance which kept the South quiet in 1790, because it "relied upon the virtue of Congress that it would exercise no unconstitutional authority?" In regard to the right to recapture fugitive slaves, it was at that time obviously a dead letter. The free States had violated that obligation by their personal liberty statutes, which were consonant with the general spirit of their people. The Abolition party, which denounced the constitution as a "league with death and a covenant with hell," was fast growing in power and influence in the free States, and threatened to become the most powerful political organization within their borders. Massachusetts had adopted resolutions by her legislature, with the assent of her governor—if his message represented his opinions—resolutions which were denounced at the time as being of a disunion character. Her senator, Bates, presented them in silence, and Colonel King, of Alabama, regretted that a proposition should come from Massachusetts to dissolve the Union. (See Lunt's Origin of the War, 128-9.) All hope of acquiring any additional political strength by the South to defend their rights was gone. The free States had announced their determination to exclude slavery from the Territories of the United States, and they had the strength to do it, if they believed, as they affected to do, that the constitution was no obstacle in their path. The right of growth was thus denied to the power of the slaveholding States, and with the state of feeling then existing and cherished, they had nothing to expect but to be dwarfed and oppressed, judging of the future by the past. Indeed, an armed invasion of Virginia had been just made by John Brown, with the avowed purpose of exciting servile insurrection, and although suppressed by the United States and State forces, it excited no such outburst of horror and denunciation at the North as it might reasonably be expected to have done. On the contrary, he seemed to have been considered more as a martyr perishing in a great and holy cause, than a criminal seeking to excite a servile war, whose victims were to be women and children. The "tolling of bells and the firing of minute guns upon the occasion of Brown's funeral; the meeting houses draped in mourning, as for a hero; the prayers offered, the sermons and discourses pronounced in his honor, as for a saint all—are of a date