The secession leaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States.

South Carolina was to have her will at last.

Crash came the shot in Charleston Harbor and the fall of Sumter.

Curiously enough two persons of Kentucky birth--Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis--led the rival hosts of war into which an untenable and indefensible system of slave labor, for which the two sections were equally responsible, had precipitated an unwilling people.
Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr.Lincoln's main reliance in Congress.

As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaled and never surpassed.