11 with the country’s great watchword—Democracy—by relating the successive encroachments of an unconstitutional tendency in the name of the Constitution, in each of which free-labor voted to extend and protect slave-labor, and our mother, with the Revolution’s blood yet hallowing her starry garments, was scorned and almost turned out of her own children’s house. This epoch, with its three sub-divisions of nullification, the territorial questions, and the reaction of Republicanism, will extend to the election of Abraham Lincoln. The third epoch will open with secession, and tell the story of the reappearance of the rights of man in the reawakening of the Revolution, when the Democrat and the Aristocrat see each other clearly at last, only a bayonet’s length apart, as they did at Bunker’s Hill and Yorktown. And as it is just as impossible to write history without ideas as it is to make nations and epochs without them, so the idea of this history will be to show how providential and inevitable was the rise of this aristocracy and the resistance of this democracy, with all the triumphs, disgraces, defeats and miseries of their irrepressible conflict, with all the accidents, treasons, indecisions and weaknesses of the people’s war ; and that these things were for the sake of having a People at last to illustrate, uphold, and organize the rights of mankind, first for America, but no less for the world. It will be a history of two necessities born of two incompatible tendencies: the necessity of aristocracy born of slavery, and the necessity of democracy born of freedom. Those two necessities not only account for all that has happened, but show how nothing could have happened otherwise, not even military disappointments, delays and imbecilities; how, in short, slavery would never have been destroyed by freedom in any other way, or upon other terms, or at any other period. We never believed this, and yet we see that it comes true, and every fresh bulletin confirms it; for if, out of all the crowd of events which makes the history of a country, a few of them happened by chance alone, the whole series of events would be vitiated, and the divine intentions, if there are any such, would be spoiled. If even one event occurred by chance, that is, illogically, shoved in, or slovenly, like the dropping of a stitch, the splendid web which we call history would
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=