CHAPTER VIII
INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
That it was possible for slave States and free States to coexist under our Federal Constitution was the belief of its framers and of most of our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been William Lloyd Garrison. In 1840, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society adopted this resolution, offered by him:
"That freedom and slavery are natural and irreconcilable enemies; that it is morally impossible for them to endure together in the same nation, and that the existence of the one can only be secured by the destruction of the other."[62]
Garrison's remedy was disunion. Near that time his paper's motto was "No Union with Slave-Holders."
The next to announce the idea of the incompatibility of slave States and free States seems to have been one who did not dream of disunion. No such thought was in the mind of Abraham Lincoln when, in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 15, 1858, he said:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be divided. It will become one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States—old as well as new—North as well as South."
When the Southerners read that statement they concluded that, as Mr. Lincoln knew very well that the South could not, if it would, force slavery on the North, he was announcing the intention of his party to place slavery "in course of ultimate extinction," constitution or no constitution.