Down into the valley of the shadow of death
Arkansas went in 1861.
On April 12 of that year, at 4:30 a.m., the thunder of a cannon rolled
across the blue water of Charleston harbor, South Carolina. Southern
forces had begun the bombardment of Fort Sumpter, and the trial of a
tremendous issue was under way.
How far might states go in deciding their own institutions? Had they the
right to leave the Union, if leaving it seemed at last the one way to
save the social pattern they had evolved?
Those questions, towering up out of slavery, had been long debated;
Feeling in both the South and North had deepened to bitterness as the
controversy proceeded. There is no need of recounting here in detail the
different conditions in the two sections which drove them on to opposite
convictions. The South believed that slavery was a vital necessity to
its economic structure. Slaves represented a great deal of its wealth.
In the North, on the other hand, slavery had never paid.
Arkansas Gazette - 1824
Two such contrary positions had become harder and harder to reconcile.
Year by year the problem had grown in magnitude and gravity, until it
overshadowed all others before the nation. It was the one absorbing
topic of conversation wherever men met. It burned to white heat in
politics, resounded through Congress, sizzled in newspaper editorials,
and echoes from the country’s pulpits.
Then in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President by the new
Republican party, as the climax of a series of events which seemed to
the South to level a lance at its very heart.
Abraham Lincoln Address Memorial -
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. |
