But if personal responsibility for prematurely forcing the conflict belongs to any body of men, it attaches to those who, in 1854, broke down the adjustments of 1820 and of 1850.

If the compromises of those years could not be maintained, the North believed that all compromise was impossible; and they prepared for the struggle which this fact foreshadowed.
They had come to believe that the house divided against itself could not stand; that the Republic half slave, half free, could not endure.

They accepted as their leader the man who proclaimed these truths.

The peaceful revolution was complete when Abraham Lincoln was chosen President of the United States.
In the closing and more embittered period of the political struggle over the question of Slavery, public opinion in the South grew narrow, intolerant, and cruel.

The mass of the Southern people refused to see any thing in the anti-slavery movement except fanaticism; they classed Abolitionists with the worst of malefactors; they endeavored to shut out by the criminal code and by personal violence the enlightened and progressive sentiment of the world.
Their success in arousing the prejudice and unifying the action of the people in fifteen States against the surging opinion of Christendom is without parallel.