In discussing this utterance of Lincoln, his latest biographer, Mr. Stephenson, who declares it reveals the dawn of his intellect, beautifully pictures how—
“arise the two ideas, the faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness; that it should be slow to compel results.”[388]
Going back ten years before the dawn of Lincoln’s intellect, and four prior to the declaration that the Negro question was, as he, Calhoun, saw it an African slave substratum on which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared, Hayne, on the floor of the United States Senate, voiced in his own words, Lincoln’s subsequently sponsored thought.
Harken to Hayne:
“Thus, Sir, it appears that the Almighty in the wise order of his providence has marked out the course of events, which will not only remove all danger, but gradually and effectually and in his own good time accomplish our deliverance from what gentleman are pleased to consider as the curse of the land.”[389]
In 1827, it is apparent that the Negro question was a different question than it later became to the South; and that the strengthening and possible spread of slavery was in some measure due to Calhoun’s devotion to it, over and above all other questions, even before Nullification, is evidenced by his letter to Maxcy in 1830:
“I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things.”[390]
Strange to state, even at that early date, he writes of the South possibly being compelled to “rebel,” to preserve her “peculiar institution.”
Fortunately for the Lower South, Lincoln and not Seward was elected president in 1860; for had Seward been raised to that position of preeminence, in all human probability the seven States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would have been allowed to secede and attempt the experiment of government involved therein, with a population of 2,619,116 whites, 36,861 free persons of color, many of whom were slave owners, and 2,312,372 Negro slaves.
That the colored population would have increased rapidly is a reasonable conclusion. Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, in all probability, would have speedily divested themselves of a great proportion of the 1,324,166 slaves they held and, even if such Southern statesmen as Leonidas Washington Spratt had not been able to reopen the African slave trade, the smuggling in of slaves on a greater and greater increasing scale would have been a consequence. Slavery being the corner stone of the new political structure, it would have been natural that the view of Governor Seabrook, that slave holding Negroes should be admitted to the ballot, would have eventually prevailed. War might have come between the large and small sections of North America from some frontier incident concerning Arkansas, the Indian Territory or Mexico; but it could scarcely have been the pulverizing conflict which the Lower South sustained by the two and a half million additional whites of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, maintained for four years of desperate struggle.