The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 | Page 6

of them are planted in the heart of man,
and, in the sunshine and air of freedom, they must germinate and grow,
and eventually produce such fruit as the eternal laws of God have made
necessary from the beginning.
The social question shaped itself amidst the turbulent elements, and
came out clear and well defined, in the perfect contrast and antagonism
of the two sectional systems. Free labor, educated, skilful, prosperous,
self-poised, and independent, grew into great strength, and accumulated
untold wealth, in all the States in which slavery had been supplanted.
Unexampled and prodigious inventive energy had multiplied the
physical power of men by millions, and these wonderful creations of
wealth and power seemed destined to have no bounds in the favored
region in which this system of free labor prevailed. Immigration,
attracted by this boundless prosperity, flowed in with a steady stream,
and an overflowing population was fast spreading the freedom and
prosperity of the Northern States to all the uncultivated regions of the
Union.
On the other hand, by a sort of social repulsion--a sort of polarity which
intensifies opposition and repugnance--the theory of slavery was
carried to an extreme never before known in the history of mankind.
Capital claimed to own labor, as the best relation in which the two
could be placed toward each other. The masses of men, compelled to
spend their lives in physical toil, were held to be properly kept in
ignorance, under the guidance of intelligent masters. The skilful control
of the master, when applied to slaves, was hold to be superior in its
results to the self-regulating energies of educated men, laboring for
their own benefit, and impelled by the powerful motives of self-interest
and independent enterprise. The safety of society demanded the

subordination of the laboring class; and especially in free governments,
where the representative system prevails, was it necessary that working
men should be held in subjection. Slavery, therefore, was not only
justifiable; it was the only possible condition on which free society
could be organized, and liberal institutions maintained. This was 'the
corner stone' of the new confederacy. The opposite system in the free
States, at the first touch of internal trouble and civil war, would prove
the truth of the new theory by bread riots and agrarian overthrow of
property and of all other institutions held sacred in the true conditions
of social order.
Such was the monstrous inversion of social phenomena which the
Southern mind accepted at the hands of their leading men, and
conceived to be possible in this advanced age of the world. Seizing
upon a system compatible only with the earliest steps in the progress of
man, and suitable only to the moral sentiments and unenlightened ideas
of the most backward races of the world, they undertook to naturalize
and establish it--nay, to perpetuate it, and to build up society on its
basis--in the nineteenth century, and among the people of one of the
freest and most enlightened nations! Evidently, this was a monstrous
perversion of intellect--a blindness and madness scarcely finding a
parallel in history. It was expected, too, that this anomalous social
proceeding--this backward march of civilization on this
continent--would excite no animadversion and arouse no antagonism in
the opposite section. It involved the reopening of the slave trade, and it
was expected that foreign nations would abate their opposition, lower
their flags, and suffer the new empire, founded on 'the corner stone of
slavery,' to march forward in triumph and achieve its splendid destiny.
These moral and social ideas might have had greater scope to work out
their natural results, had not the political connections between the
North and the South implicated the two sections, alike, in the
consequences of any error or folly on the part of either. Taxation and
representation, and the surrender of fugitive slaves, all provided for in
the Constitution, were the points in which the opposite polities came
into contact in the ordinary workings of the Federal Government.
Perpetual conflicts necessarily arose. But it was chiefly on the question

of territorial extension, and in the formation of new States, that the
most inveterate of all the contests were engendered. The constitutional
provisions applicable to these questions are not without some obscurity,
and this afforded a plausible opportunity for all the impracticable
subtleties arising out of the doctrine of strict construction. From the
time of the admission of Missouri, in 1820, down to the recent
controversy about Kansas, the territorial question was unsettled, and
never failed to be the cause of terrible agitation.
But the march of events soon superseded the question; and even while
the contest was fiercest and most bitter, the silent operation of general
causes was sweeping away the whole ground of dispute. The growth of
population in the Northern States was so unexampled,