January 27, 1861.—Six States have “seceded.” Let them go. If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure. In all the free States, and in a majority if not in all of the slaveholding States, popular government has been sucessful. But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure. Freedom and slavery can, perhaps, not exist side by side under the same popular government. There probably is an “irrepressible conflict”¹ between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as well be formed with that as an admitted fact.
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¹ This phrase had first been used by William H. Seward in a speech at Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858.
