[80] college. But his election was almost purely geographical. The South had sustained a defeat, not at the hands of a party, but at those of the Northern power. Every Northern State but New Jersey had voted for Mr. Lincoln; every Southern State had voted against him. Hie was not known as a statesman, whose name might therefore be one of national significance; he was known only as a partisan, and the election of such a man in such a character was plainly to declare war against the other side.
In the face of this sectional triumph there was plainly no protection for the South in the future. There was none in power; for the superiour political strength of the North was now beyond dispute. There was none in public opinion; for that, all the political history of America showed, was the slave of the majority. There was none in the courts; for the Dred Scott decision had been denounced in the Chicago platform as a dangerous heresy, and the doctrine upon which Mr. Lincoln had been elected had been actually declared illegal by the supreme judicial authority of the country.
In Congress the Northern States had 183 votes; the South, if unanimous, 120. If then the North was prepared to act in a mass its power was irresistible; and the election of Mr. Lincoln plainly showed that it was prepared so to act and to carry out a sectional design. The antislavery power in the North was now compact and invincible. A party opposed to slavery had organized in 1840, with about seven thousand voters; in 1860, it had polled nearly two million votes, and had succeeded in electing the President of the United States. The conservative party in the North had been thoroughly corrupted. They were beaten in every Northern State in 1860, with a single exception, by the avowed enemies of the South, who, but a few years ago, had been powerless in their midst. The leaders of the Northern Democratic party had, in 1856 and in 1860, openly taken the position that freedom would be more certainly secured in the Territories by the rule of non-intervention than by any other policy or expedient. This interpretation of their policy alone saved the Democratic party from entire annihilation. The overwhelming pressure of the anti-slavery sentiment had prevented their acceding to the Southern platform in, the Presidential canvass. Nothing in the present or in the future could be looked for from the so-called conservatives of the North; and the South prepared to go out of a Union which no longer afforded any guaranty for her rights or any permanent sense of security, and which had brought her under the domination of a section, the designs of which, carried into legislation, would destroy her institutions, and even involve the lives of her people.
Such was the true and overwhelming significance of Mr. Lincoln's election to the people of the South. They saw in it the era of a sectional domination, which they proposed to encounter, not by revolution, properly
