system in which the plantation principle, race-rule and race-slavery, were organic centers; and, on the other, a social system in which the principle of popular power and government, the town meeting, and the common school were the ganglia of social expansion.  Contrary ideas beget naturally enough contrary interests and institutions.  So it is no matter for surprise that the local interests and institutions of the thirteen revolted colonies lacked homogeneity and identity.  What was calculated to promote the general welfare of the Northern one, it was quite possible might work a totally opposite result in the Southern.  For, indeed, while there were slaves in them all, the slave system had taken root in Southern soil only; and while on the other hand the spirit of freedom was existent in each, free labor had rooted itself in Northern ground solely.

As the war of the Revolution was an uprising against arbitrary power, and for the establishment of political liberty, it pushed easily into the foreground the larger subject of human rights.  Most of the leading actors felt the inconsistency of keeping some men in bondage, when they were fighting to rid themselves of a tyranny which, in comparison to the other, was a state of honorable freedom.  Their humanity condemned African slavery, and they earnestly desired its extinction.  The Declaration of Independence proves to how high a level the tide of freedom rose in the colonies.  The grand truths by it proclaimed the signers of that instrument did not restrict in their application to some men to the exclusion of other men.  They wrote “All men,” and they meant exactly what they wrote.  Too simply honest and great they were to mean less than their solemn and deliberate words.

On political as well as on moral grounds they desired emancipation.  But there was a difficulty which at the time proved insuperable.  The nation-making principle, the idea of country, was just emerging out of the nebulous civil conditions and relations of the ante-Revolutionary epoch.  There was no existent central authority to reach the evil within the States except the local governments of the States respectively.  And States in revolt against the central authority of the mother country would hardly be disposed to divest themselves of any part of their newly asserted right to govern themselves for the purpose of conferring the same upon any other political body.  To each State, then, the question was necessarily left for settlement.

The war, during its continuance, absorbed the united resources and energies of the people and their leaders.  The anti-slavery movement made accordingly but small progress.  Reforms thrive only when they get a hearing.  Public attention is the food on which they thrive.  But precious little of this food was the Abolition cause able to snatch in those bitter years.  It could not grow.  It remained in the gristle—­hardly more than a sentiment.  But the sentiment was a seed, the promise and potency