station, and of sharing in any danger which he might
encounter. It is hardly necessary to say that
I apprehended none.” To the “great
astonishment” of Mr. Brown, however, the train
brought only “Mrs. Lincoln and her three sons,”
and “it was then announced that he had passed
through the city incognito in the night train.”
This is a small bit of evidence to set against the
elaborate stories of the believers in the plot, yet
to some it will seem like the little obstruction which
suffices to throw a whole railway train from the track.
I would rather let any reader, who is sufficiently
interested to examine the matter, reach his own conclusion,
than endeavor to furnish one for him; for I think
that a dispute more difficult of really conclusive
settlement will not easily be found.
[127] Some of the Southern members of Congress collected
and recited sundry noteworthy utterances of Republicans
concerning slavery, and certainly there was little
in them to induce a sense of security on the part
of slaveholders. Wilson, Rise and Fall of Slave
Power, iii. 97, 154.
[128] Toombs declared, as Lincoln had said, that what
was wanted was that the North should call slavery
right. Wilson, Rise and Fall of Slave
Power, iii. 76. Stephens declared the “corner-stone”
of the new government to be “the great truth
that the negro is not equal to the white man; that
slavery ... is his natural and normal condition;”
and said that it was the first government “in
the history of the world based upon this great physical,
philosophical, and moral truth.” N. and
H. iii. 203; and see his letter to Lincoln, ibid.
272, 273. Mississippi, in declaring the causes
of her secession, said: “Our position is
thoroughly identical with the institution of slavery,—the
greatest material interest in the world.”
N. and H. iii. 201. Senator Mason of Virginia
said: “It is a war of sentiment, of opinion;
a war of one form of society against another form
of society.” Wilson, Rise and Fall of
Slave Power, iii. 26. Green of Missouri ascribed
the trouble to the “vitiated and corrupted state
of public sentiment.” Ibid. 23. Iverson
of Georgia said it was the “public sentiment”
at the North, not the “overt acts” of
the Republican administration, that was feared; and
said that there was ineradicable enmity between the
two sections, which had not lived together in peace,
were not so living now, and could not be expected
to do so in the future. Ibid. 17.
[129] Historians generally seem to admit that the
South had to choose between making the fight now,
and seeing its favorite institution gradually become
extinct.
[130] Sometimes, though very rarely, the word was
used.
[131] See Lincoln’s message to Congress, July
4, 1861.
