Her ruling classes were without exception an
aristocracy of brains--yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.
The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate
three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in
slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new
social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He
himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was
the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and
threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.
The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly
insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for
discussion had passed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles
had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two
vast sectional divisions on the issue.
Beyond the fierce and uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown
into a consuming passion throughout the North and had resulted in the
election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate--behind and
underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental
fact--the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and
the fullness thereof were his.
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