to propose but that the free States should withdraw from “their covenant with death and agreement with hell”—­in other words, from the Union,—­whereby they would not have liberated one slave.  They included possibly too many of that sort who would seek salvation by repenting of other men’s sins.  But even these did not indulge this propensity at their ease, for by this time the politicians, the polite world, the mass of the people, the churches (even in Boston), not merely avoided the dangerous topic; they angrily proscribed it.  The Abolitionists took their lives in their hands, and sometimes lost them.  Only two men of standing helped them:  Channing, the great preacher, who sacrificed thereby a fashionable congregation; and Adams, the sour, upright, able ex-President, the only ex-President who ever made for himself an after-career in Congress.  In 1852 a still more potent ally came to their help, a poor lady, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who in that year published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” often said to have influenced opinion more than any other book of modern times.  Broadly speaking, they accomplished two things.  If they did not gain love in quarters where they might have looked for it, they gained the very valuable hatred of their enemies; for they goaded Southern politicians to fury and madness, of which the first symptom was their effort to suppress Abolitionist petitions to Congress.  But above all they educated in their labour of thirty years a school of opinion, not entirely in agreement with them but ready one day to revolt with decision from continued complicity in wrong.

6. Slavery and Southern Society.

In the midst of this growing America, a portion, by no means sharply marked off, and accustomed to the end to think itself intensely American, was distinguished by a peculiar institution.  What was the character of that institution as it presented itself in 1830 and onwards?

Granting, as many slave holders did, though their leaders always denied it, that slavery originated in foul wrongs and rested legally upon a vile principle, what did it look like in its practical working?  Most of us have received from two different sources two broad but vivid general impressions on this subject, which seem hard to reconcile but which are both in the main true.  On the one hand, a visitor from England or the North, coming on a visit to the South, or in earlier days to the British West Indies, expecting perhaps to see all the horror of slavery at a glance, would be, as a young British officer once wrote home, “most agreeably undeceived as to the situation of these poor people.”  He would discern at once that a Southern gentleman had no more notion of using his legal privilege to be cruel to his slave than he himself had of overdriving his old horse.  He might easily on the contrary find quite ordinary slave owners who had a very decided sense of responsibility in regard to their human chattels.  Around his