Foreign commentators on American history have declared that a peaceable solution of the slavery question was not beyond the power of wise and patriotic statesmanship.  This may or may not be true.  No solution of the problem could have been at once final and peaceable, unless it provided for the ultimate extinction of slavery without any violation of the Constitutional rights of the Southern states; and it may well be that the Southern planters could never have been argued or persuaded into abolishing an institution which they eventually came to believe was a righteous method of dealing with an inferior race.  Nobody can assert with any confidence that they could have been brought by candid, courageous, and just negotiation and discussion into a reasonable frame of mind; but what we do know and can assert is that during the three decades from 1820 to 1850, the national political leaders made absolutely no attempt to deal resolutely, courageously, or candidly with the question.  On those occasions when it would come to the surface, they contented themselves and public opinion with meaningless compromises.  It would have been well enough to frame compromises suited to the immediate occasion, provided the problem of ultimately extinguishing slavery without rending the Union had been kept persistently on the surface of political discussion:  but the object of these compromises was not to cure the disease, but merely to allay its symptoms.  They would not admit that slavery was a disease; and in the end this habit of systematic drifting and shirking on the part of moderate and sensible men threw the national responsibility upon Abolitionist extremists, in whose hands the issue took such a distorted emphasis that gradually a peaceable preservation of American national integrity became impossible.

The problem of slavery was admirably designed to bring out the confusion of ideas and the inconsistency resident in the traditional American political system.  The groundwork of that system consisted, as we have seen, in the alliance between democracy, as formulated in the Jeffersonian creed, and American nationality, as embodied in the Constitutional Union; and the two dominant political parties of the Middle Period, the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats, both believed in the necessity of such an alliance.  But negro slavery, just in so far as it became an issue, tended to make the alliance precarious.  The national organization embodied in the Constitution authorized not only the existence of negro slavery, but its indefinite expansion.  American democracy, on the other hand, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the spirit and letter of the Jeffersonian creed, was hostile from certain points of view to the institution of negro slavery.  Loyalty to the Constitution meant disloyalty to democracy, and an active interest in the triumph of democracy seemed to bring with it the condemnation of the Constitution.  What, then, was a good American to do who was at once a convinced democrat and a loyal Unionist?