He has worked
for schools, for colleges, for canals, for railroads, for the quick
dissemination of intelligence, for the rule of the people on every
subject, including slavery, and for that rule in places of maturing
sovereignty, like territories, and in places of complete sovereignty,
like states. He is spiritually hard, hates the sap-head, the agitator,
the simple-hearted moralist. He is indifferent to slavery, when it
stands in the way of his republic building. He knows that slavery cannot
thrive in the North. He knows that prairies of corn, hills of iron and
coal, fields of wheat are as alien to slavery as the tropics are alien
to polar bears and reindeer. He sees a God who works through climate;
and he sees that the cotton calls for a certain kind of worker, and corn
for another. He did not read and he did not know much of anything of the
work of Marx and the Revolutionary Manifesto of 1848. He did not need
to. He sensed the materialistic conception of history. He had no horror
of slavery, knowing exactly what it was; on the other hand he was
falsely accused of trying to plant it in the territories.
He was hunted and traduced! Moralists prattled of his lack of a moral
nature; envy tracked him, shooting from ambush! He had become rich and
famous. He was the first man in his party.
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