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CHAPTER III.

CAUSES OF THE DISRUPTION OF THE UNION.-BALANCE OF POWER.

HAVING examined what the Union has really become, and to what extent its political institutions have tended to increase all those original elements of dissolution which exist in all federal governments, we proceed to consider the immediate causes of its disruption. They may be classed, and will be most clearly examined, under three heads:

First. A political cause; the reversal of the balance of power, by the immigration into the Northern States.

Secondly. Embittered feeling; existing originally, but aggravated by the continued. agitation of Northern Abolitionists.

Thirdly. Endangered interests; exposed now to the action of the Protectionist party, on their accession to permanent power.

No one will presume to assign the exact proportions in which these causes have combined to produce the present convulsion. Each of them has had greater weight than either of the others,

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with some particular class in the South, but all have contributed to the common sentiment, and may be doubted whether any one of them, alone, would have sufficed to sever the Union. In all revolutions, whatever the immediate cause of the catastrophe, it will be found that there has been a long train of accumulating causes, gradually sapping the foundations of loyalty to government, engendering discontent, or arousing animosity, and piling up, so to speak, the combustible materials which any accidental spark might kindle into a flame.

The collisions to which the question of Slavery has given rise have exercised a very large influence in producing the rupture; but Slavery has not been its principal cause, for it has never been in dispute; and, indeed, we shall find that many of the aggressive, and most reprehensible acts of the South, apparently in furtherance of the spread of its system, have really been measures of political defence. They have not had the extension of Slavery as an object of desire, as an end, but simply as a means by which to maintain its political position, in face of the rapidly increasing population of the Northern power.

If there be any one motive stronger than another in communities which have largely increased, that impulse is the desire of self-government. When once aroused, it seems impossible to allay it. It is the eager and irrepressible desire of youth to assume the dignity of manhood, but

strengthened and inflamed, as all passions are, by the accumulative influence of numbers. No other description of comfort, or profit, or luxury, will satisfy the craving when once aroused. There cannot be a more striking proof of this than in the revolt of the colonies from the rule of this country. There was no real hardship-no actual oppression. It was not the true object of that revolt to escape a duty of three pence per pound on tea, nor yet to maintain an abstract principle acted upon in no part of America, and unrecognized in most parts of the world. Its real object was independence; a desire to be their own masters. Curtis, in his "History of the Constitution," observes: "It was a war begun and prosecuted for the express purpose of obtaining and securing for the people who undertook it, the right of self-government."

The strength of this desire, when once excited, may be estimated by the obstacles then to be surmounted. There were bonds to be broken, perhaps more binding than any clauses of a written compact. There were the links of a common history, of no inglorious memory-the interwoven ties of relationship and ancestry-old associations of habits, of thought, of sympathy-and it might be, some trace, however faint, of the reverence of the offspring for the parent. The England of George the Third's time, whatever its faults, was England. It was not in the power of any error of a ministry, or imposition of a tax, or regulation of excise, to obliterate the fact that to her they owed

existence. All of them alike-Puritan of Massachusetts, Cavalier of Virginia, Friend of Pennsylvania-had gone out from that same home. It was her language that was on their lips; it was her law that guarded their rights; her example had taught them liberty; the fame of her great men was a solemn inheritance, descending on both alike. It was the old mother land. Its trees, its birds, its castles, its legends, were the mind's earliest pictures. Fancies of childhood, dreams of youth, memories of age, all wandered there. History was there with grand old names, and scenes of stirring deeds, and ancient walls once strong, now beautiful. And there, too, might be found some village spire, girdled around with immemorial yews, under whose solemn shade were stones, with old faint lines, that, when the moss was moved, would tell them where their own forefathers sleep.

The England of those times was not, indeed, what it is now-far less enlightened and genial. It has grown still older, and happier. But even then it was the land of Hampden and Sydney, of Shakspeare and Milton, of Bacon and Newton, of Marlborough and Blake. None could regard it as a parent that any distant child had need to disown, or to confess reluctantly. Yet all these claims, appealing with mute eloquence to every gentle or noble impulse of duty in the present, or reverence for the past-unwritten indeed in any books of law, but piercing where laws cannot reach-all

were at once discarded, and forgotten, to appease this irresistible desire for self-government.

Thus, it would appear that the strongest of all restraining influences are powerless to withhold a people, when once aroused to the desire of independence. But why should the Southerners seek to be independent of a government, apparently their own, or to separate from those to whom they are not even under the grating burden of an obligation? In reality, the people of the North and South form distinct and rival communities. They are indeed mainly of the same extraction, and a greater uniformity of appearance and dialect exists than will be found within the comparatively narrow boundaries of this country. But in temperament, interests, and views of social polity, the people of the South are, as a rule, opposed to those of the North in a more violent antagonism than exists between any two nations of Europe. Our own animosity to France was traditional and political; it never descended to the dislike of the individual Frenchman. The evidence of Russell's letters displays a far more inveterate feeling, the existence of which has long been known to all who have visited the United States. It is true that he is describing the extremes of the case, and that in some portions of the Border States the sentiment tones down into neutrality; but, as a rule, the original antipathy between Cavalier and Roundhead has remained to this day.

Indeed, the force of the original discordance of

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