Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederate States, in a speech at Atlanta, Georgia, said: 

’Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and many others, were tender of the word slave, in the organic law, and all looked forward to the time when the institution of slavery should be removed from our midst as a trouble and a stumbling-block.  The delusion could not be traced in any of the component parts of the Southern Constitution.  In that instrument we solemnly discarded the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians, that all men of all races were equal, and we have made African inequality, and subordination, the chief corner-stone of the Southern Republic.’

Here we have the great idea of an essential difference in relation to the Constitution and slavery existing at the present day South, from that which did exist at the time of its ratification universally by the people of the thirteen States.  The Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy frankly admits that slavery is its chief corner-stone; that our ancestors were deluded upon the subject of slavery; that the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence respecting the equality of all men, and their natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are only the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians; consequently that in the Southern Constitution all such trash was solemnly discarded.  Can clearer proof be wanted to show that the stand-point of slavery and freedom has altogether changed since the days of Washington?  Is it not true that our country at the present day presents the singular spectacle of two great divisions, one holding to the Constitution as interpreted by our ancestors North and South, the other openly repudiating such interpretation?  Is it strange, with such a radical difference existing as to the import of the Constitution upon the subject of slavery, that we should have such frequent and ever persistent charges of Northern aggression?  If the history of slavery be kept in mind, it will be seen that it has steadily had its eye upon one end, and that is national aggrandizement.  Thus about two hundred thousand slaveholders wield all the political power of the South, and compel all non-slaveholders to acquiesce in their supremacy.  But whatever the South may choose to do, the North is under obligation to give to slavery nothing more than what is guaranteed in the Constitution.  If more than this is asked for, the North is bound by a just regard for its own interests and the prosperity of the country to refuse compliance.  It has been seen that even admitting that a State has a just cause of complaint, or supposing as a matter of fact that the Constitution is violated, she can not set herself up to be exclusively the judge in this matter, and leave the Union at her convenience.