The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -17

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -17

Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy of a few earnest
persons, without political weight enough to carry the
election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle
was disunion, because they were convinced that within the
Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of
the proverb, great effects do not follow from small
causes,--that is, disproportionately small,--but from
adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To
contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn,
as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender
strong- box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real
miracle lies in that divine league which bound all the forces
of nature to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its
destiny. Everything has been at work for the past ten years
in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison and Phillips have
been far less successful propagandists than the slaveholders
themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance of their
pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the question
upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by
defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the defensive.
But, even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread
desire on the part of the North to commit aggressions, though
there was a growing determination to resist them. The
popular unanimity in favor of the war three years ago was but
in small measure the result of anti-slavery sentiment, far
less of any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war,
every movement of the allies of slavery in the Free States,
has been making Abolitionists by the thousand.