Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/261

 is proclaimed — the fact remains (and we can all see it now) that our Declaration of Independence had been for three-quarters of a century a grinning mask. It could not remain so longer. The spirit that had inspired the men who made that Declaration, not fully knowing what they did, was ready at last to turn the mask into the flushed face of the goddess of America. A time had come when a President who could understand the immortal words was to be elected, and he was elected. The laws against the slave-trade were now to be executed. The spirit of the Declaration of Independence was now not only to be enacted in statutes, but, within limits, to become the faith of the people.

Under Buchanan it was possible for the slave-bark Cora to be captured on the coast of Africa on the 18th day of May, carried to New York, let go after a form of condemnation, and then captured once more on the slave-coast, on December 10 of the same year.

With the advent of Abraham Lincoln the sham passed away. Here was a man who had the first characteristics of all heroes — sincerity and strength. He would, with charity for all and with malice toward none, and with such obstacles in his way as no American had ever faced before, and no American will ever face again — he would do his duty. Of all books that have been written here and may now be had for a price, there is none so well worth the study of an American reader, if he will but seek the heart of it, as a Life of Abraham Lincoln. But the American Carlyle has yet to come to place the heart of it plainly before us.

In a letter regarding the slave-trade written by Mr.