Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/8

2 consent to disruption for a moral object, let it cast the first stone at them for their weakness. But at the last Presidential election, the question being distinctly put to the people whether they would compromise with Slavery for the Union, the people answered by a great majority that they would not. Then the victory was given into their hands. Let the nation which can boast of virtue pure and unalloyed, which has needed no pressure of circumstances to force it into the right way, no suffering to purge its vision that it might clearly discern good from evil, no chastisement to teach it the will of Heaven—let this nation, I say again, cast the first stone. To the American people the Union was not empire only, but immunity from hostile neighbourhood and standing armies; it was the pledge not of power only, but of liberty and peace.

That Slavery was the cause of the war, who can sincerely doubt? Secession broke out and had its focus in the centre of Slavery, spread wherever Slavery prevailed, was most intense where Slavery prevailed most. It did not extend to the free districts of the South, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, the inhabitants of which were dragged into the Confederacy by force. It exactly followed the wavering line of slavery in the mixed States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The secession ordinances proclaimed as the ground, and the sole ground, of the revolt the rights of Slavery, threatened by Northern abolition. The Southern prophets all prophesied of a vast slave empire as the reward of success. Visions of such an empire, stretching from the grave of Washington to the hills of Montezuma, filled the minds of Secessionists, as visions of a perfect Christian society and of a reign of Christ on earth filled the minds of the Wycliffites and the Puritans, as