seen in the gradual emancipation of all the slaves on the continent.  It had begun in the New England States then.  In the Caribbean Sea and South America emancipation had been gradually closing in upon the small compass of the Southern States, and that by peaceful measures, and of its own volition; so much so that it would have eventually died out, could not be denied by any who would look that far into the future, and judge that future by the past.  The South looked with alarm and horror at a wholesale emancipation, when they viewed its havoc and destruction in Hayti and St. Domingo, where once existed beautiful homes and luxuriant fields, happy families and general progress; all this wealth, happiness, and prosperity had been swept away from those islands as by a deadly blight.  Ruin, squalor, and beggary now stalks through those once fair lands.

A party sprang up at the North inimical to the South; at first only a speck upon the horizon, a single sail in a vast ocean; but it grew and spread like contagion.  They were first called agitators, and consisted of a few fanatics, both women and men, whose avowed object was emancipation—­to do by human hands that which an All-wise Providence was surely doing in His own wise way.  At first the South did not look with any misgivings upon the fanatics.  But when Governors of Northern States, leading statesmen in the councils of the nation; announced this as their creed and guide, then the South began to consider seriously the subject of secession.  Seven Governors and their legislatures at the North had declared, by acts regularly passed and ratified, their determination “not to allow the laws of the land to be administered or carried out in their States.”  They made preparation to nullify the laws of Congress and the constitution.  That party, which was first called “Agitators,” but now took the name of “Republicans”—­called at the South the “black Republicans”—­grown to such proportions that they put in the field candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States.  Numbers increased with each succeeding campaign.  In the campaign of 1860 they put Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin forward as their standard bearers, and whose avowed purpose was the “the liberation of the slaves, regardless of the consequences.”  This party had spies all over the Southern States, and these emissaries incited insurrection, taught the slaves “that by rising at night and murdering their old masters and their families, they would be doing God’s will;” that “it was a duty they owed to their children;” this “butchery of the sleeping and innocent whites was the road to freedom.”  In Virginia they sent down armed bands of whites, roused the negroes at night, placed guns, pikes, and arms of every kind in the hands of the poor, deluded creatures, and in that one night they butchered, in cold blood, the families of some of the best men in the State.  These cold blooded butcheries would have done credit to the most cruel