Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/342

332 of freedom was stigmatized as sectional, the party of slavery eulogized as national. A party, the main body of which continually flourished the knife of the assassin over the head of the nation—that party national! A truly loyal and national man will never feel tempted even to threaten the life of the nation. [Applause.] The slave power disclosed its enmity to the nationality, first by the threat, and then the earnestness of the threat by the attempt.

At last, when under Buchanan’s Administration the assumptions and usurpations of the slave power culminated in the Dred Scott and Lecompton policy, the people of the North, the democratic element of the country, rose up, and at the election of 1860 it vindicated its liberties and its manhood. It rescued the Republic from the grasp of an anti-democratic as well as anti-national power. [Great applause.] Then the second great period of the history of the American people arrived at the crisis of its development. The first had solved the problem of achieving the foundation of the new nationality and defending it against its great enemy abroad; the problem of the second is to maintain the American nationality by defending it against its great enemy at home. The election of 1860 was a notice given to the slave power that the American nation meant no longer to live in cowardly fear of the murderous knife pointed at its heart by a set of imperious aristocrats, but that it meant to take its government into its own hands.

This was the first grand uprising of the democratic spirit of the people against the absolute control of the slave power. The high-handed attempt of the latter to force the people to surrender the attributes of our Government, springing from tho Northern spirit of equality, to the Southern spirit of aristocratic dominion, was foiled, and the slave power, seeing that its arrogated privilege to