Puslapio vaizdai
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The Republican party which cast such an astonishing vote in 1856, was barely one year old, and must be sent to school. Young and vigorous as a hickory sapling, it is very verdant and altogether too sappy; the infant, though a Hercules, must be put under severe training, in order to conquer the Giants of Darkness at the next great contest. Four years more this new schooling must last, till the Folk-Soul graduate fully prepared for its work. Not yet sufficiently indurated and indoctrinated in its principles is the North, which has still to take up into its very being that the Union must indeed be preserved, but shall produce no more Slave-States. The work of Kansas is, then, not yet finished; her throes must again be roused from Washington in a final supreme effort to make hers a polity enslaved, in opposition to her desperate struggles.

So the North has to undergo the discipline of defeat, painful but salutary. It has not been united upon the great duty of the Age; it has not obeyed fully the behest of the World-Spirit. Olympian Zeus, or his modern representative in Anerica, declares to the Northern Folk-Soul now summoned into his presence and given an outlook upon the far vaster coming plan in his

bosom: "Not only must you stop producing Slave-States, you must now think of undoing slavery in the new, and then in the old SlaveStates, if you wish to win the favor of the Gods." Replies the American Folk-Soul: "I cannot touch slavery in the States where it is already established by law." Whereupon Zeus frowning answers: Then I shall turn against you, and scourge you, and humiliate you with defeat, till you do fulfill the decree sent from above." Such is the discipline of defeat often recorded in that old Greek as well as in our American Iliad, the peculiar training from the hand of Zeus himself, meted out even to the people whom he favors till they do the right thing.

And by way of counterpart it must be added that the South also is in training through these events; indeed she shows herself trained already to a fixed purpose by her long possession of national power. We have to believe that she thinks she must rule in any case, rule by violence if necessary; though now clearly a minority, she deems that the government of the Nation is hers by a kind of hereditary right. She will use the Law as long as she can; but when she can no longer administer it in her own interest, she will defy it and revolt. In Kansas we have seen how she employs legal forms to bolster her supremacy against the majority. Really this has been her study for many years

in ruling the Nation, in fact ever since the North began to outstrip her in numbers and wealth. We can now see that she put altogether too great faith, lawyer that she was, in formal legality, paying too little regard to the spirit of the Law, to that elemental justice which is the original of all Laws and gives to them even their forms. So the South as well as the North, in this bitter Kansas testing of souls, shows her character and her deepest consciousness, giving also suggestive glimpses of what she will do in the future.

But the year 1856 has given to the South another quadrennial lease of power, though with many a sharp admonition, which she would do well to heed. The cry of an endangered Union, raised by her and her supporters, has been listened to by a sufficient number of Northern States to keep her still in her national supremacy. But is she really honest in her anxiety about the Union, or' is she merely or mainly threatening? That is what she is now given an opportunity to prove. The sincerity of her love for the Union is already questioned just through her menaces. She must expect that the real lovers of the Union will the next time reply: The Union cannot let itself be threatened, particularly by its friends.

CHAPTER III. THE STRUGGLE RE

NEWED. (1857–8.)

Invasion

The peace which Geary brought to Kansas in 1856, is destined to turn out delusive. from Missouri has indeed shown itself unsuccessful so often, that it is given up, at least on its large scale; but another method has been excogitated at Washington, which is to renew the old struggle by applying fresh instruments of torture to the people of Kansas that they be compelled to adopt slavery. This is essentially a return to the beginning of the contest in 1855, all of which has to be fought over again.

There was at first a cessation of political excitement in the North after the election, as it was generally thought that Buchanan would give to Kansas self-government, which of course meant that she would be a Free-State. And such was doubtless Buchanan's early purpose. But when he was fairly launched on the sea of

Washington pro-slavery influence, he began to change. Moreover that dualism in the Democratic platform starts to opening wider and wider, and he has to take sides. He, weak in himself, is borne forward by the stronger current of his party.

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In his inauguration address, the President alludes to a judicial decision soon to be given, which would settle the whole territorial question upon the principle of popular sovereignty." Thus Buchanan knew beforehand of the Dred Scott decision, and of its interpretation of popular sovereignty. Did he have any hand in bringing about that decision? Seward and Lincoln thought so; but in view of his character the probability is that he simply accepted the scheme which the Southerners had forged in their own inner circle.

And now we come to the great new move of the slave-power to destroy the Republican party and to keep their domination against the everincreasing majority of the North, and specially to make Kansas a Slave-State. The National Judiciary is to be dragged into the political conflict, as the Territorial Judiciary of Kansas had already been made to protect and to assist the Missouri invaders. Two days after Buchanan's inauguration Taney, the Chief Justice, gave the opinion of the majority of the Supreme Court in the case of the negro Dred Scott. Without

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