..."It has been the fault of living American statesmen that they could not see when it was living and large before their eyes, a political necessity foreseen by the great founders of their constitution as the probable issue of differences even much less extreme than those which have been created by the later sequence of events. How little the actual extension of slavery was concerned in the discussion whether a new territory should be free or slave, is shown in the case of New Mexico. This territory has been organised more than ten years. It lies at the extreme south, and adjoins a slave state; its soil as well as its climate are suitable for slave labour; it is open to slavery, which is protected there by the Supreme Court of the United States. Yet in ten years this region, four times as large as England, has acquired a population of but twenty-two slaves, and of these only twelve are domiciled. And, urges Mr. Spence (from whose excellent recent book on the American Union we draw much of our argument), in the cry against New Mexican slavery, are we to suppose that the conscience of the North is so framed that it grieves over this poor dozen, at the same time that it endures four millions close at home?" That it endures, we may add, more than three thousand in the district of Colombia itself, the capital district of the Union, lying unshielded by the constitution in the absolute control of congress. But we may go on to show more clearly that, hateful as all slavery is, and most desirable above all things as is the advent of the day when there shall be no more slaves, white or black, a high moral consideration of the evils of slavery on one side, and a highly immoral determination to prolong them on the other, is neither the root nor the fruit of the deplorable war now raging iu America."...

More to come...

[All The Year Round, A Weekly Journal, by Charles Dickens, Mar-Sep 1861. Vol. 5]

________________________
David Upton