to see whether or not they must fight for their purpose, construed the words of the new President correctly.  They heard him say:  “The union of these States is perpetual.”  “No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.”  “I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.”  He also declared his purpose “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.”  These sentences made up the issue directly with secession, and the South, reading them, knew that, if the North was ready to back the President, war was inevitable; none the less so because Mr. Lincoln closed with patriotic and generous words:  “We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Until after the election of Mr. Lincoln in November, 1860, the sole issue between the North and the South, between Republicans on the one hand and Democrats and Compromisers on the other, had related to slavery.  Logically, the position of the Republicans was impregnable.  Their platforms and their leaders agreed that the party intended strictly to respect the Constitution, and not to interfere at all with slavery in the States within which it now lawfully existed.  They said with truth that they had in no case deprived the slaveholding communities of their rights, and they denied the truth of the charge that they cherished an inchoate design to interfere with those rights; adding very truly that, at worst, a mere design, which did not find expression in an overt act, could give no right of action to the South.  Mr. Lincoln had been most explicit in declaring that the opposition to slavery was not to go beyond efforts to prevent its extension, which efforts would be wholly within the Constitution and the law.  He repeated these things in his inaugural.

But while these incontrovertible allegations gave the Republicans a logical advantage of which they properly made the most, the South claimed a right to make other collateral and equally undeniable facts the ground of action.  The only public matter in connection with which Mr. Lincoln had won any reputation was that of slavery.  No one could deny that he had been elected because the Republican party had been pleased with his expression of opinion on this subject.  Now his most pointed and frequently reiterated expression of that opinion was that slavery was a “moral, social, and political evil;” and this language was a fair equivalent of the statement of the Republican platform of 1856, classing Slavery and Mormonism together, as “twin relics of barbarism.”  That the North was willing, or would long be willing, to remain in amicable social and political bonds with a moral, social, and political evil, and a relic of barbarism, was intrinsically improbable, and was made