all principles and all interests to its own.  Not being ambitious of having the United States converted into a Western Congo, with the traffic in “niggers” as its fundamental idea, the people elected Abraham Lincoln, in a perfectly Constitutional way, President.  As the majority of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the Supreme Court was still left, by this election, on the side of the “rights of the South,” (humorously so styled,) and as the President could do little to advance Republican principles with all the other branches of the Government opposed to him, the people naturally imagined that the slaveholders would acquiesce in their decision.

But such was not the result.  The election was in November.  The new President could not assume office until March.  The triumphs of the Slave Power had been heretofore owing to its willingness and readiness to peril everything on each question as it arose, and each event as it occurred.  South Carolina, perhaps the only one of the Slave States that was thoroughly in earnest, at once “seceded.”  The “Gulf States” and others followed its example, not so much from any fixed intention of forming a Southern Confederacy as for the purpose of intimidating the Free States into compliance with the extreme demands of the South.  The Border Slave States were avowedly neutral between the “belligerents,” but indicated their purpose to stand by their “Southern brethren,” in case the Government of the United States attempted to carry out the Constitution and the laws in the seceded States by the process of “coercion.”

The combination was perfect.  The heart of the Rebellion was in South Carolina, a State whose free population was about equal to that of the city of Brooklyn, and whose annual productions were exceeded by those of Essex County, in the State of Massachusetts.  Around this centre was congregated as base a set of politicians as ever disgraced human nature.  A conspiracy was formed to compel a first-class power, representing thirty millions of people, to submit to the dictation of about three hundred thousand of its citizens.  The conspirators did not dream of failure.  They were sure, as they thought, of the Gulf States and of the Border States, of the whole Slave Power, in fact.  They also felt sure of that large minority in the Free States which had formerly acted with them, and obeyed their most humiliating behests.  They therefore entered the Congress of the nation with a confident front, knowing that President Buchanan and the majority of his Cabinet were practically on their side.  Before Mr. Lincoln could be inaugurated they imagined they could accomplish all their designs, and make the Government of the United States a Pro-Slavery power in the eyes of all the nations of the world.  Mr. Calhoun’s paradoxes had heretofore been indorsed only by majorities in the national legislature and by the Supreme Court.  What a victory it would be, if, by threatening rebellion,