..."The Union first consisted of thirteen little societies on the Atlantic side of North America. It consists now of two great opposing powers, from which, after their accepted disruption, a great western region on the shores of the Pacific is again likely to fall off into quiet independence. The struggle between North and South has been of long duration. South having the lead in the federation, had fought some hard political battles to retain it, and had already been beaten on some vital points. Put at the last presidential election, which was a trial of strength distinctly between South and North, the South considering itself finally subjected to the North within the federation, carried out its frequent threat and desire of secession."...
..."The North, if it had not been divided into its own factions, would now have been irresistible. But use could be made of Northern faction in the Southern interests. What are called the Republicans of the North represent its Conservative and Protectionist party, which include whatever is reckoned as the aristocracy. These are opposed by the South, partly because they represent the strength of the free states, partly because they are protectionist where protection is not to the interest of Southern trade. Against the Republicans, therefore, the Southern party has fought, and has been able often to prevail, even in the House of Representatives, by coalition with the Northern democrats. But in the midst of all this painful balancing of interests there came the last presidential election. Every Northern state voted for Mr. Lincoln. Every Southern state voted against him. Jefferson had said long ago that "a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every irritation will make it deeper and deeper." Here was the geographical line distinctly chosen for the demarcation of two rival interests. The Northern States had one hundred and eightythree votes; the Southern one hundred and twenty. The North had shown that it could act in a mass and be irresistible as the stronger half in ill-assorted union. Then the South, feeling that within the Union the staff had finally gone from its hands, determined to withdraw from a federal compact that imposed on it a government hostile in spirit and adverse in policy to its commercial interest."...
..."There is but one field of industry—the plantation—and industry is brought from without to occupy it. There could be no more fatal blow dealt to the South than this that comes of the working of its own "peculiar institution." But the North is really fighting not to destroy or confine, but to claim its right of continued participation in this institution. The Southern planter, holding his slave to be property, desires security in its possession, and that he had and can only have under the sort of union from which, on other accounts, he has withdrawn. The constitution of the United States, framed by slaveowners, gave the whole might of the Union for suppression of slave insurrection. It provided also for the capture and restoration into bondage of any escaped slave. The capital
of the Union that the North fights to maintain is a slave-holding city, and it's federal court decrees slavery to be a prison with walls wide as the country. Within the Union there was and there would be, were the Union restored, no place of lawful hope for the fugitive from a thraldrom which every man has a just right to throw off if he can. If, therefore, detestation of slavery were really the animating spirit of the North, it should rejoice at a division by which it is parted for ever from the unclean thing, and enabled, like England, to declare every man free whose foot touches its soil. But instead of rejoicing to be clear of the taint, instead of exulting at a change which confines the slave system to the slave-holding states, and not only absolves the North from the degrading duties of slave-catcher, but gives it a chance of strangling the whole system of slave labour with a girdle of freedom, the states of the North fight—if for anything at all in the way of slavery, for nothing but continuance of their participation in the wrong. The South, instead of seceding for the sake of slavery, secedes in spite of the fact that its separate maintenance will expose them, under that head, to risks and losses against which the Union would afford security. The Chicago manifesto of the Northern party, now supreme, adopts as its fourth article the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions, while the small party of thorough-going abolitionists, without political importance, though now hot with the Unionists, has been accustomed to claim "justice for the slave at any price," and to deprecate what its leaders sometimes called "the blood-stained Union." "This Union," said William Lloyd Garrison, one of their chief authorities, "this Union is a lie; the American Union is a sham, an imposture, a covenant with death, an agreement with hell." Mr. Lincoln, on the other hand, said most distinctly, in his inaugural address: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists; I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." He expressed in the same speech his willingness that the Fugitive Slave Law, as a provision of the constitution, "should be made express and irrevocable."...
..."Of whom, then, are we to believe, and with what shadow of truth can it be represented to us, that the fight of the North is against slavery, or that the secession of the South is for its preservation? Nobody doubts that the party use made of the slave question has embittered feeling between South and North. But the main party use of it has been for the raising of political capital on behalf of other interests than those of the slave. Even the separation of the South from these sources of irritation must be reckoned, with every more material consequence of its establishment as a separate republic, among the changes that all tend to clear away some of the difficulties in the way of a sound reconsideration of the slave system. The division of the Union into two adjacent republics, one slave-holding, the other free, would, in fact, bring us very many years nearer to the end of slavery than a continuance of the old system under a great Union pledged to support as a whole the evil that afflicts a half."...
[All The Year Round, A Weekly Journal, by Charles Dickens, Mar-Sep 1861. Vol. 5]
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David Upton