John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

“ [144] divided against itself.” His associates were scandalized by his rashness, and begged him to omit the phrase. Merciful heavens! Had not this house been divided against itself for three-quarters of a century? Yes, truly, this whole matter was a fate-drama, and in a deeper sense than Seward imagined or than even Lincoln could guess. Seward with his perception of the “irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,” and Lincoln with his vision of the blood of white men, drawn by the sword, which should repay the blood of slaves that had been drawn by the lash — saw only the main crash of the drama. The reality of it was profounder, and the trailing consequences of it were to be more terrible than they suspected.

The intellectual and moral heritages of slavery are with us still. The timidity of our public life and of our private conversation is a tradition from those times, which fifty years of freedom have not sufficed to efface. The morbid sensitiveness of the American to new political ideas has been a mystery to Europe. We cannot bear to hear a proposition plainly put;--or let me say, we are only recently beginning to cast off our hothouse condition, and to bear the