The design was audacious, but from the stand-point of the men who were committed to it, it was not illogical.

Their entire industrial system was founded upon an institution which was bitterly opposed in the free States.

They could see no way, and they no longer desired to see a way, by which they might rid themselves of the servile labor which was at once their strength and their weakness.

To abandon the institution was to sacrifice four thousand millions of property specially protected by law.

It was for the existing generation of the governing class in the South to vote themselves into bankruptcy and penury.