central government, for the purpose of coercing the South to submit to their political opinions. The Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts confessed that "the object to be accomplished was this, for the free States to take possession of the government."
The spirit in which they meant to exercise it is expressed with the characteristic force and candour of American language by the representative of the same State in Congress: "When we shall have elected a President, as we will, who will not be the President of a party, nor of a section, but the tribune of the people, and after we have exterminated a few more dough faces from the North, then if the slave Senate will not give way, we will grind it between the upper and nether millstones of our power." A pamphlet, which was widely circulated and was read in Congress, contains the following sentence: "Teach the slaves to burn their masters' buildings, to kill their cattle and hogs, to conceal and destroy farming utensils, to abandon labour in seed time and harvest, and let the crops perish." Mr. Chase said, in 1859: "I do not wish to have the slave emancipated because I love him, but because I hate his master." A Senator from Ohio said very truly: "There is really no union now between the North and the South, no two nations on earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancour towards each other than these two nations of the Republic."
In this state of public feeling and political division, the candidate of Abolitionists and Republicans was elected President. Four years before, a former President, Mr. Fillmore, prophesied the catastrophe that would ensue. "We see a political party presenting candidates for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency, selected for the first time from the Free States alone, with the avowed purpose of electing these candidates by suffrages from one part of the Union only, to rule over the whole United States. Can it be possible that those who are engaged in such a measure can have seriously reflected on the consequences which must inevitably follow in case of success? Can they have the madness or the folly to believe that our
