It had never been questioned, hitherto, that the several States of the Union, so far at least as concerned their domestic institutions, were each and all of them, under the Constitution, absolutely self-governing.  But the threats which the Black Republicans held out were tantamount to a proposal to set the Constitution aside.  It was their charter of liberty, therefore, and not only their material prosperity, which the States that first seceded believed to be endangered by Lincoln’s election.  Ignorant of the temper of the great mass of the Northern people, as loyal in reality to the Constitution as themselves, they were only too ready to be convinced that the denunciations of the abolitionists were the first presage of the storm that was presently to overwhelm them, to reduce their States to provinces, to wrest from them the freedom they had inherited, and to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water to the detested plutocrats of New England.

But the gravamen of the indictment against the Southern people is not that they seceded, but that they seceded in order to preserve and to perpetuate slavery; or, to put it more forcibly, that the liberty to enslave others was the right which most they valued.  This charge, put forward by the abolitionists in order to cloak their own revolt against the Constitution, is true as regards a certain section, but as regards the South as a nation it is quite untenable, for three-fourths of the population derived rather injury than benefit from the presence in their midst of four million serfs.* (* Of 8.3 million whites in the fifteen slave-holding States, only 346,000 were slave-holders, and of these 69,000 owned only one negro.) “Had slavery continued, the system of labour,” says General Grant, “would soon have impoverished the soil and left the country poor.  The non-slave-holder must have left the country, and the small slave-holder have sold out to his more fortunate neighbour."* (* Battles and Leaders volume 3 page 689.) The slaves neither bought nor sold.  Their wants were supplied almost entirely by their own labour; and the local markets of the South would have drawn far larger profit from a few thousand white labourers than they did from the multitude of negroes.  It is true that a party in the South, more numerous perhaps among the political leaders than among the people at large, was averse to emancipation under any form or shape.  There were men who looked upon their bondsmen as mere beasts of burden, more valuable but hardly more human than the cattle in their fields, and who would not only have perpetuated but have extended slavery.  There were others who conscientiously believed that the negro was unfit for freedom, that he was incapable of self-improvement, and that he was far happier and more contented as a slave.  Among these were ministers of the Gospel, in no small number, who, appealing to the Old Testament, preached boldly that the institution was of divine origin, that the coloured race had been created for servitude, and that to advocate emancipation was to impugn the wisdom of the Almighty.