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[283] literature, and holding themselves above party obligations, still in the main regarded the Constitution as an immoral instrument and the Union as the pernicious machinery invented to promote a great national sin. For these men the attempts made under the rendition law—the so-called fugitive slave law—to recover the absconded negro held to service by statutes of several States, were opportunities which they quickly seized to stir afresh the fires of sectional hate. Disturbances in several localities arising out of arrests and trials under the act referred to, although for the time local, were published by pen and voice with all the exciting additions of appeal to humanity on behalf of the fugitive, and fiery denunciations of the slave catchers who had invaded free States to assert their titles to property in human beings. These exciting causes were only sufficiently numerous to bring into prominent notice throughout the South the nature of the nullifying laws passed by Northern States, and to inform Southern readers of the press concerning the determined hostility toward the institution of slavery. They were also sufficient to furnish the Free Soilers with grounds for hope that agitation on this account would so influence the Northern mind again as to increase the power of that sectional party. A reference here is both necessary and proper to the singularly popular book called ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and published during the campaign of 1852 and pending the growing excitement over the fugitive slave law. The reference is made to that work only to further show the fact that the ‘settlement’ was not allowed to be a ‘finality,’ and to point out one of the methods used to destroy the work of patriotic statesmen, and to intimate the coming of Southern secession. The book was designed to aid and abet the renewed conspiracy against that ‘more perfect Union,’ which now existed by virtue of the compromise of 185o and the national fraternal alliance of the North
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
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