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MAY, 1861.    DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.    453
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of battering down the present Government at Washington upon treacherous divisions among the people of the North.  An united North was not among their calculations, and there was much in the history of Northern subserviency to the Slave Power to encourage their reckoning.  But now all is changed--quite changed.  People, press and pulpit, with exceptions too insignificant to mention, are knitted together like the iron links of a coat of mail.  'Southern brethren,' 'forbearance,' 'concession,' 'compromise,' 'peace,' and 'reconstruction,' have everywhere been exchanged for sterner watch-words.  The cry now is for war, vigorous war, war to the bitter end, and war till the traitors are effectually and permanently put down.  The moral tone of the North has risen, the manly spirit of the North is quickened, and its activity, enterprize and energy are all ranged on the side of the national Government.

If, however, the change in the popular feeling has been quick and sudden, the causes leading thereto have been long maturing.--The Government has been patient, forbearing and long suffering beyond all example.  It had seen inflammatory appeals and heard rebellious threats six months ago, and for the last four months it has seen treason actively organizing itself in Conventions for Secession, into all sorts of military bodies for resisting and defying the power of the United States; it has seen seven States formally secede from the Union, and set up a Government for themselves; it has seen the armed traitors robbing and plundering its property, and seizing its own means of self-preservation; it has seen its own flag insulted and hauled down over its own forts and arsenals; it has seen frowning forts and batteries erected for the very purpose of disputing its authority and securing its overthrow; and still it hoped and waited for the return of reason and good feeling, without lifting an arm or firing a ball; but when it saw an attempt to starve out Major ANDERSON and his men from Fort Sumter, and open all their rebel batteries for the destruction of that fortress, both Government and people were compelled to awake from all dreams of peace.

Whatever else may take place, one thing at least is certain, the slaveholding rebellion will be crushed out, and its leaders covered with execrations and curses in the very sections where they have been most popular.  They have blinded and befooled the people into the belief that great masses of men at the North and in the Middle States would stand by them in their unprovoked and fratricidal war upon the Government.  They have boasted their ability to send more men into the field because of their slavery.  They have spoken of themselves as giants and heroes, and of Northern men as pigmies and cowards.  They have laughed at the President's proclamation, and contrasted the strength and sagacity of Montgomery with the weakness and imbecility of Washington.  What a revulsion in popular feeling will come over the South when it finds it has been deceived, misled and ruined, for ruined it will be.  Let the ports of the South be blockaded; let business there be arrested; let provisions, arms and ammunition be no longer sent there; let the grim visage of a Northern army confront them from one direction, a furious slave insurrection meet them at another, and starvation
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threaten them from still another, and they will begin to murmur a discontent which will surely break out at last in bitter execration and curses upon the guilty authors of their triple woes.  The confederate slaveholding traitors are now only on the outer wave of the whirlpool of treason; every circle they now make will bring them nearer the centre that is certain to swallow them up, and hurl them to the bottom of its howling waters.
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THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
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Whoever will calmly and impartially contemplate the present aspect of the slavery question, cannot fail to read in the stern logic of passing events, the resolute determination on the part of the South to subjugate every other section of the country, and bring it wholly within the sphere of its unlimited control.  This is no hyperbole, but the language of that stubborn reality which is shadowed forth in every act of the Black Power.  Emboldened by its past achievements, and encouraged by the suicidal admissions of the majority of professed anti-slavery men in the free states, slavery has grown more imperious and exacting, boldly threatening in the person of its TOOMBS, to call the roll of its slaves on Bunker Hill, then, through DOUGLAS in the Senate, lifting up its haggard brow, and to the representatives of anti-slavery sentiment declaring in defiant tone, 'we will subdue you;' or, through its chivalrous champion, BROOKS, attempting on the floor of Congress, to murder in cold blood the noble and gifted SUMNER, because he spoke forth the words of truth and soberness.  Thus has it gone on until now it has reached the climax of its defiant iniquity.  Men and women, because of their complexion, are driven in their old age from their hard-earned homes, or allowed to remain where they were born only on condition of their becoming slaves.

Nor is the poor black man alone the victim of the barbaric cruelties and indignities upon which our would-be masters feast and fatten.  In violation of the Constitution, in violation of the comity of States, in violation of the rudimental principles of our Government, men and women, of the orthodox and constitutional complexion, accused of no crime save a lack of sympathy with slavery, are treated with every indignity which satanic malice could invent, or brutal frenzy inflict; their property confiscated, their houses burned over their heads, their lives hanging upon the caprice of a mob, hunted like wild beasts, driven from their homes, in some instances, without a moment's warning.  No more flagrant outrages against unoffending citizens are recorded in the annals of persecution.--In no other community of the civilized world, could such flagrant usurpations of tyranny be perpetrated with impunity.

These heart-rending developments were a part of the modus operandi by which the promised subjugation of freedom was to be effected.  The threatened victory was not primarily expected to be achieved by the dissolution of the Union, or by the arbitrament of the sword.  The South did not expect to bring the North to terms by effecting a complete change in the growing anti-slavery sentiment of the free States.  This JEFFERSON DAVIS declares, is wholly impossible.  How, then, did she expect to accomplish her purpose?  Her prospects of success were summed up in two words:  CONTINUED AGGRESSIONS.
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The South contemplated persistence in her wholesale aggressions upon the free States, her burglary upon the rights of human nature, until every right dear to a freeman's heart should be wrested from him, and freedom become so emasculated and dispirited, as to render abortive all attempts to rally our scattered, peeled, and worried forces; and thus we were to be subdued.  For years has she made known her intentions, leaving her place of ambush, and recklessly rushing into the highway.  She has exhibited the plan of operations with an audacity commensurate with her stupendous iniquity.

We are not disposed to deny that the usually cautious South, in thus reasoning from premise to conclusion, had a right to expect much from the spaniel-like servility which has been a prominent and disgraceful characteristic of the North.  It would seem, after all, that the North has something more than 'a local habitation and a name,' and that the Southern insolence and bravado have counted altogether too largely upon our constitutional proclivity to crush out liberty to 'save the Union.'  Our new President and his Cabinet, as ardently as they desire Peace, are not content to accept as its condition, the proffered ultimatum of the rebels.  The compromises manufactured to order by WEED, CORWIN & CO., look not only to a repeal of our Personal Liberty Bills, &c., but they contemplate an abrogation of the fundamental principles of all legitimate civil government, the first, prime, sole law of social organization, the primal law of human relations.  Mr. LINCOLN knows very well, that for him to adopt a policy which involves such abrogation, is to disband the Republican party, and cover himself with merited and imperishable infamy.--It is to make the extension and perpetuation of slavery a fixed fact, and fling a solemn pall over the sanguine hopes of the eighteen hundred thousand men who placed him in power, firmly believing that he was the man for the hour.

We sincerely trust that the hopes which have been engendered by the disposition and determination of the new Administration to act firmly with the traitors and rebels of the seceded States, will not be blasted by any renewed attempts to 'compromise,' and 'concede,' and 'conciliate.'  There is, in fact, but the one alternative--either to recognize the secession movement as a successful revolution, to be treated as such, or, as a causeless rebellion, to be promptly suppressed.  Successful compromise is wholly out of the question.  Indeed, the traitors with that impertinent coolness and diabolic candor peculiar to them, have repeatedly declared that they will listen to no compromises which acknowledge the right of the people of the free States to regard slavery as a moral and political evil, and thus to denounce it.

We cannot tell what a day or an hour may bring forth; but at the present moment, a peaceful settlement is scarcely within the range of human probability.  THE DECISIVE BLOW MUST BE STRUCK.  The question must be decided very shortly in one way or another.  Our opinion is, that it is only necessary, in order to humble the haughty and defiant South, for Mr. LINCOLN to develop that inflexible Jacksonian firmness for which he has obtained credit; to show the South that he is in earnest, if need be, in terrible earnest; and
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