Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/249

Slavery Question in Oregon. 225 been blown out. The church, though at times admitting the relative duties of master and slave (servant), had no words of condemnation for that system of bondage practiced by its members, which destroyed the holy relations of husband and wife, parent and child, and reduced the bondman to the status of a brute. The colleges and schools were upon the same level. The doctrines of the revolutionary fathers had been ji long time recanted and in their place was essayed the monstrous proposition, freshly canonized by the highest tribunal in the nation, that the negro had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. Our Southern brethren had molded the church, the school, and their State governments to conform to and uphold their pet institution, and signified their Avillingness to destroy the Union when it could be no longer used to promote their peculiar interests. In this respect the South, as a political, economic and social force, was solid. Vice-President Breckinridge could go into the free States and plead the compromises of the Constitution and Southern rights under them, but the Republican who went South to organize a Fremont Club would be considered reckless as to his personal safety. This was well known and consequently no attempt was made to contest the election in the slave States. But one man in the State of Kentucky, Cassius M. Clay, had the audacity to speak against slavery, and he bore the scars of many a bloody conflict. If slavery were to continue, our Southern brethren were not wrong in their means of continuance, for the system was founded in fraud and force and inseparable from them. The symbols of such a civilization were properly the bludgeon, scourgfe, gibbet, bowie knife and revolver. All this was as well under- stood m 1856 as now, but there were enough citizens of the North, actuated by fear or partisan spirit, to continue the Democratic party in power. Anti-slavery men were much pained by the defeat of Fremont, but after-occurrences rec- onciled them to that dispensation of Providence as being for the best. Neither the man nor the time had arrived for the