John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[116] of principles, there is nothing in it to show that Dana had yet become an abolitionist. From a letter to James Pike, it appears that he went to Chicago on June 22, 1852, to be gone a week, and while there delivered a lecture on slavery, the manuscript of which, in his own well-known handwriting, is now in my possession. It is by far the most formal and complete statement of his opinions on that subject ever made by him. It was prepared with great care after much study, and while it cannot be claimed that it shows his exact state of mind for any date later than the last of June or the first of July of that year, it raises a strong presumption that it contains the matured and settled views which he always held on that important .subject.

After a careful recital of the historical facts, Dana reached the conclusion that through the action of the slave-holding States themselves and the growth of public opinion, slavery would ultimately come to a peaceful and not a violent end, that neither revolt nor outside interference were probable, that there was no case in all history where revolt had been able to sustain itself, or had succeeded in abolishing slavery. He dismissed the idea of violent emancipation in this country as chimerical, but declared, with prophetic confidence

the United States will extinguish slavery before slavery can begin to extinguish the United States.

Nowhere in this admirable disquisition is there a touch of sectionalism or of dislike to the Southern people. While the author does not conceal his sympathy with freedom, or his hope that the time will come, by natural and peaceable steps, when every American will be free, he suggests no sort of outside interference with the institution where it then legally existed. He recognized the ultimate tendencies