It is common to reproach the Southern leaders with reckless folly.  They tried to destroy the Union, which they really valued, for the sake of slavery, which they valued more; they in fact destroyed slavery; and they did this, it is said, in alarm at an imaginary danger.  This is not a true ground of reproach to them.  It is true that the danger to slavery from the election of Lincoln was not immediately pressing.  He neither would have done nor could have done more than to prevent during his four years of office any new acquisition of territory in the slave-holding interest, and to impose his veto on any Bill extending slavery within the existing territory of the Union.  His successor after four years might or might not have been like-minded.  He did not seem to stand for any overwhelming force in American politics; there was a majority opposed to him in both Houses of Congress; a great majority of the Supreme Court, which might have an important part to play, held views of the Constitution opposed to his; he had been elected by a minority only of the whole American people.  Why could not the Southern States have sat still, secure that no great harm would happen to their institution for the present, and hoping that their former ascendency would come back to them with the changing fortunes of party strife?  This is an argument which might be expected to have weighed with Southern statesmen if each of them had been anxious merely to keep up the value of his own slave property for his own lifetime, but this was far from being their case.  It is hard for us to put ourselves at the point of view of men who could sincerely speak of their property in negroes as theirs by the “decree of the Creator”; but it is certain that within the last two generations trouble of mind as to the rightfulness of slavery had died out in a large part of the South; the typical Southern leader valued the peculiar form of society under which he lived and wished to hand it on intact to his children’s children.  If their preposterous principle be granted, the most extreme among them deserve the credit of statesmanlike insight for having seen, the moment that Lincoln was elected, that they must strike for their institution now if they wished it to endure.  The Convention of South Carolina justly observed that the majority in the North had voted that slavery was sinful; they had done little more than express this abstract opinion, but they had done all that.  Lincoln’s administration might have done apparently little, and after it the pendulum would probably have swung back.  But the much-talked-of swing of the pendulum is the most delusive of political phenomena; America was never going to return to where it was before this first explicit national assertion of the wrongfulness of slavery had been made.  It would have been hard to forecast how the end would come, or how soon; but the end was certain if the Southern States had elected to remain the countrymen of a people who were coming to regard their fundamental institution with growing reprobation.  Lincoln had said, “This government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.”  Lincoln was right, and so from their own point of view, that of men not brave or wise enough to take in hand a difficult social reform, were the leaders who declared immediately for secession.