FACE TO FACE.

Face to face at last were freedom and slavery.  The final struggle between them for mastery had come.  Narrow, indeed, was the issue that divided the combatants, slavery extension on the one side, and slavery restriction on the other, not total and immediate emancipation, but it was none the less vital and supreme to the two enemies.  Back of the Southern demand for “More slave soil” stood a solid South, back of the Northern position, “No more slave soil” was rallying a fast uniting North.  The political revolution, produced by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, advanced apace through the free States from Maine to Michigan.  A flood-tide of Northern resistance had suddenly risen against the slave-power.

Higher than anywhere else rose this flood-tide in Massachusetts.  The judge who remanded Anthony Burns to slavery was removed from office, and a Personal Liberty Law, with provisions as bold as they were thorough, enacted for the protection of fugitive slaves.  Mr. Garrison sat beside the President of the State Senate when that body voted to remove Judge Loring from his office.  Such was Massachusetts’s answer to the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, and a triumphant slave-power.  Its instant effect was to accelerate in the South the action of the disunion working forces there, to hurry the inevitable moment when the two sections would rush together in a death-grapple within or without Webster’s once glorious Union.

Indeed the foes had already closed in a frightful wrestle for the possession of Kansas.  When the National Government adopted the popular sovereignty doctrine in solution of the Territorial problem between the two halves of the Union, freedom and slavery thereupon precipitated their forces upon the debatable land, and, for the first time, the men of the North and the men of the South came into actual physical collision in defence of their respective ideas and institutions.  The possession of land is nine points of the law among Anglo-Saxons, and for this immense advantage both sides flung themselves into Kansas—­the North by means of emigrant aid societies, the South by means of bands of Border ruffians under the direction of a United States Senator.  It was distinctly understood and ordained in connection with the repeal of the compromise of 1820, that final possession of the Territories then thrown open to slave labor should be determined by the people inhabiting the same.  In the contest for peopling Kansas the superior colonizing resources of the free States was presently made manifest.  They, in any fair contest with ballots, had a majority of the polls, and were, therefore, able to vote slavery down.  Worsted as the South clearly was in a show of heads, it threw itself back upon fraud and force to decide the issue in its favor.  The cartridge-box took the place of the ballot-box in bleeding Kansas, and violence and anarchy, as a consequence, reigned therein for the space of several years.