Besides this element, there was another not less specious which lent to the scheme an air of fairness, and that was the application to the Territories of the American principle of local self-government, in other words, the leaving to the people of the Territories the right to vote slavery up or vote it down, as they might elect.  The game was a deep one, worthy of the machinations of its Northern and Southern authors.  But, like other elaborate schemes of mice and men, it went to pieces under the fatal stroke of an unexpected circumstance.  The act which abrogated the Missouri Compromise broke the much-enduring back of Northern patience at the same time.  In the struggle for the repeal Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats forgot their traditionary party differences in battling for Southern interests, which was not more or less than the extension to the national Territories of the peculiar institution.  The final recognition of this ugly fact on the part of the free States, raised a popular flood in them big enough to whelm the Whig party and to float a great political organization, devoted to uncompromising opposition to the farther extension of slavery.  The sectionalism of slavery was at last met by the sectionalism of freedom.  From that moment the old Union, with its slave compromises, was doomed.  In the conflict then impending its dissolution was merely a matter of time, unless indeed the North should prove strong enough to preserve it by the might of its arms, seeing that the North still clung passionately to the idea of national unity.

Not so, however, was it with Garrison.  Sharper and sterner rose his voice against any union with Slaveholders.  On the Fourth of July following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the reformer at Framingham, Mass., gave a fresh and startling sign of his hatred of the Union by burning publicly the Constitution of the United States.  Before doing so however, he consigned to the flames a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, next the decision of Judge Loring remanding Anthony Burns to slavery, also the charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the Grand Jury touching the assault upon the court-house for the rescue of Burns.  Then holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all the other atrocities—­a covenant with death and an agreement with hell—­and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!  And let all the people say, Amen!” This dramatic act and the “tremendous shout” which “went up to heaven in ratification of the deed” from the assembled multitude, what were they but the prophecy of a fiercer fire already burning in the land, soon to blaze about the pillars of the Union, of a more tremendous shout soon to burst with the wrath of a divided people over that

  “perfidious bark
  Built i’ th’ eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.”

CHAPTER XIX.