of the nation. Mr. Iverson, of Georgia, in speaking on this subject in the United States Senate, on the 5th of December, 1860, said, "Sir, disguise the fact as you will, there is an enmity between the Northern and the Southern people, which is deep and enduring, and you never can eradicate it never. .. We are enemies as much as if we were hostile States. We have not lived in peace. We are not now living in peace. It is not expected that we shall ever live in peace."

Mr. Mason, of Virginia, in the same debate, said, "This is a war of sentiment and opinion, by one form of society against another form of society."

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Garrett Davis, senator from Kentucky, said, "The Cotton States, by their slave labor, have become wealthy, and many of their planters have princely revenues from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars a year. This wealth has begot pride, and insolence, and ambition; and those points of the Southern character have been displayed most insultingly in the halls of Congress. As a class, the wealthy cotton growers are insolent, they are proud, they are domineering, they are ambitious. They have monopolized the government in its honors for forty or fifty years, with few interruptions. When they saw the scepter about to depart from them, in the election of Abraham Lincoln, sooner than give up office, and

the spoils of office, in their mad and wicked ambition, they determined to disrupt the old Confederation, and erect a new one, wherein they would have undisputed power. Nine out of ten of the Northern people were sound upon the subject. They were opposed to the extension of slavery; and I do not condemn them for that but they were willing to accord to the slaveholders all their constitutional rights."

The slaveholders had become arrogant in their demands upon Congress, claiming that the Constitution favored freedom, free labor, and free schools, and that it should be so far changed as to maintain the exclusive claims of an aristocratic class, and to strengthen their hold upon their slaves. They insisted that the domestic slave trade should be nurtured, and the foreign slave trade opened. They demanded the right to extend slavery over all the Territories of the United States; the right to hold their slaves in all the States. of the Union temporarily; that speaking or writing against slavery in any State of the Union should be a penal offence; that the North should catch their fugitive slaves, and send them back to bondage; and that the administration of the General Government should be placed in the hands of those only whom the South could trust, as the pledged enemies of republican equality, and the friends of slavery. These were the demands of the South, which, they said, must be

acceded to, or they would dash the Union to pieces and from the fragments construct a Confederacy, with slavery for its corner-stone.

In the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, in 1860, the people of the United States said, most emphatically, "We will not accede to these arrogant and wicked demands. We will not thus change the Constitution of our fathers. We will abide by it as it is." In an appeal to the ballot-box the slaveholders were fairly and overwhelmingly defeated, and they determined to secede and break up the Union.

As long ago as 1856, Hon. Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, said, in a speech in Charleston, at an ovation given in his honor, for his brutal assault upon Senator Sumner, of Massachusetts, for words spoken in debate in his place in the Senate, "I tell you, fellow-citizens, from the bottom of my heart, that the only mode which I think available for meeting it [the issue], is just to tear the Constitution of the United States, trample it under foot, and form a Southern Confederacy, every State of which shall be a Slaveholding State."

Mr. Hunter, of Virginia, detailed in the Senate of the United States the changes in the Constitution with which alone the Slaveholders would be satisfied. His demands were,

1. Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery

in the States, or the District of Columbia, or the dockyards, forts, and arsenals of the United States.

2. Congress shall not abolish, tax, or obstruct the slave trade between the States.

3. It shall be the duty of each of the States to suppress combination, within its jurisdiction, for the armed invasion of any other State.

4. States shall be admitted with or without slavery, according to the election of the people.

5. It shall be the duty of the States to restore fugitive slaves, or pay the value of the same.

6. Fugitives from justice shall be deemed those who have offended the laws of the State within its jurisdiction, and shall have escaped therefrom.

7. Congress shall recognize and protect as property, what is held to be such by the laws of any State, in the Territories, dockyards, arsenals, forts, and wherever the United States have exclusive jurisdiction.

Mr. Hunter also demanded that there should always be two Presidents chosen, one by the Slaveholding States, and the other by the North, and that no act should be valid unless approved by both Presidents. Thus giving to not more than three hundred thousand slaveholders as much power in the government as to the other thirty millions of population. He also demanded that the United States Supreme Court should consist of ten members, five to be chosen

by the little handful of slaveholders, and the other five by the millions of freemen.

To accomplish their purpose, every man at the South was to be compelled, by the reign of terror, to support the cause of the slaveholders. Vigilance committees were organized, the mails were searched, and a system of espionage introduced, such as no despotism on earth ever before equalled. A gentleman from Hinds County, Mississippi, wrote to the editor of the New York Tribune, under date of February 7, 1861,

"I have lived in this State twenty-five years. Yet if I should say, not openly upon the housetop, but at my own table, among my family and friends congregated there, that I do not consider that the South has any real grievance to complain of, and totally oppose the secession of this or any other State from the Union, my property, my life even, would not be safe an hour. It is very certain that those who are in favor of secession have no more than a bare majority in any of the Southern States. We, the Union men of the South, call on you of the North not to desert us."

The slaveholders demanded further, in addition to the right of the general extension of slavery, that the laws of the Free States should be so changed as to enable them to hold their enslaved servants at the North temporarily, while, at the same time, they refused to allow a Northern gentleman even to enter their States with a free hired colored servant.