Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/51

Rh indignation against orthodox hypocrisy demurely pandering to the wickedness of wealth and power, may have provoked them to the use of language offensive to piety. Our criticism is easy, their struggle was hard.

It was not the opponents of Slavery, however, that roused the North at last, but the slave-owners themselves. Evil always contains in it the germ of its own destruction. The tyrannical violence of the slave-owner carried him beyond what subserviency could endure—his tendency to aggression beyond what apathy could overlook; while his uneasy conscience led him to exact securities for his institution, which were effectual only in multiplying and exasperating his enemies. The fugitive slave-law was a final appeal to whatever of morality and honour might linger in the heart of the nation. A captured slave, dragged back to the lash through the streets of a Northern city, was a sight to make the stones cry out against the sufferance of a debased people. Slavery, as it were, scourged on the reaction which finally bore Mr. Lincoln into power; and even Mr. Lincoln himself was in effect elected by the slave-owners, who might, with their democratic allies in the North have carried a moderate friend of Slavery, but chose to split the party, and let an avowed enemy become President, that they might have a pretext for civil war. An avowed enemy to Slavery Mr. Lincoln was, and steadfastly, though by constitutional means, did he seek its overthrow; yet he and his party, at the time of his election, hoped only for its territorial limitation. It was Slavery itself that would be satisfied with nothing short of its own destruction. The Kansas question had wound up both parties almost to the war-pitch. The assault on Mr. Sumner had already given the signal of violence. The slave-owners sprang to arms.