saved every Southern State except South Carolina. Undoubtedly such would have been the effect of a general agreement upon these resolutions between the two sections. But did the Republicans desire it? It would seem not from the postscript to Mr. Chandler's letter to Governor Blair: "Some of the manufacturing States think that a fight would be awful. Without a little blood-letting, this Union will not, in my opinion, be worth a curse." This was from a senator from Michigan, a man of much influence in his party. Virginia, not yet giving up her hope of preserving the Union, interposed to call "a peace conference." Resolutions were adopted by this body, composed of able and eminent men from the different States, very similar to Mr. Crittenden's, which met with no better success. Under these circumstances, what were the slaveholding States to do? In 1790 they kept quiet, because they "relied upon the virtue of Congress that they would do nothing without constitutional authority." Was such a faith any longer rational? Had not the conduct of the free States proved that the guarantees of the constitution upon the subject of slavery were no longer of the slightest avail to them? Upon that subject the majority in Congress, who were from these States, assumed whatever power they wanted. Could the minority rely upon the constitution to protect any of their rights, if it suited the passions or the interests of the majority to invade them? Our government was fast being revolutionized, and becoming one of a despotic majority of numbers; the limitations of a written constitution fast proving themselves to be without the defence of the political power to enforce them. Had the South the slightest hope of attaining any increase of that power? It had proved itself unable to do this in the past: what was the hope for the future? Lunt (p. 363) says with justice: "That it is impossible to regard the proceedings of the Chicago convention in any other light than as equivalent to a proclamation of absolutely hostile purposes against the Southern section of the country. They were not, technically, a declaration of war, to be conducted by arms, simply because they proposed only to use the pacific force of superior numbers, in order to deprive the minority of its rights under the constitution." (Lunt's Origin of the War, p. 362.) Indeed, one of its resolutions was amended so as to declare: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God en-
