Life^ Services and Character of Jefferson Davis. 141
Pacific ocean to their native shores. Four million of black men lived in the South side by side with the white race ; and race integrity now incensed the South to action.
Look further southward beyond the confines of our country, and behold how the Latin races have commingled their blood with the aborigines and negroes, creating niongrel republics and empires, where society is debased and where governments, resting on no clear principles, swing like pendulums between the extremes of tyranny and license.
On the contrary, the American element at the South — and I quote a profound Northern writer in saying it — *' guarded itself with the strictest jealousy from any such baleful contaminations." But what a picture of horror rose before its eyes as it contemplated the freeing of the slaves. John C. Calhoun had drawn that picture in vivid colors which now, recalling the days of carpet-bag and negro ascen- dency, seems like a prophet's vision. ** If I owned the four million of slaves in the South," said Robert Lee, " I would sacrifice all for the Union " And so, indeed, would the Southern people. But Lee never indicated how such sacrifice could obtain its object, nor was it possible that it could. It was not the property invested in the slave that stood in the way, for emancipation with compensation for them was then practicable, and was again practicable in early stages of the war, and was indeed offered. But free the slaves, they would become voters ; becoming voters, they would predominate in numbers, and so predominating, what would become of white civilization ?
This was the question which prevented emancipation in Virginia in 1832. Kill slavery, what will you do with the corpse ? Only silent mystery and awful dread answered that question in 1861, while the clamors of abolition grew louder, and the forces were accumu- lating strength to force the issue. In fourteen Northern States the fugitive-slave law had been nullified. In new territories armed mobs denied access to Southern masters with their slaves. Negro equality became a text of the hustings, and incendiary appeals to the slaves themselves to murder and burn filled the mails.
The insurrection of Nat. Turner had given forecast of scenes as horrible as those of the French Revolution, and the bloody butcheries of San Domingo seemed like an appalling warning of the drama to be enacted on Southern soil.
The crisis was now hastened by two events. In 1854 ^^^ Supreme Court, in the Dred-Scott decision, declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which limited the extension of slavery to a certain line of
