204 C. F. Adams 'denied. It was a portentous issue, for in it human destiny was challenged. The desperate risk the Southern States then took is plain enough now.' They entered upon a distinctly reactionary movement against two of the foremost growing forces of human development, the tendency to nationality and the humanitarian spirit. Though they knew it not, they were arraying themselves against the very stars in their courses. Under these circumstances the secession-slavery movement be- tween 1835 and i860 was a predestined failure. Because of fortu- itous events — the chances of the battle-field, the impulse of indi- vidual genius, the exigencies of trade or the blunders of diplomats — it might easily have had an apparent and momentary triumph ; but the result upon which the slave power, as such, was intent, — the creation about the Gulf of Mexico and in the Antilles of a great semi-tropical nationality, based on African servitude and a monop- ohzed cotton production, — this result was in direct conflict with the irresistible tendencies of mankind in its present stage of develop- ment. A movement in all its aspects radically reactionary, it could at most have resulted only in a passing anomaly. While the Southern, or Jamestown, column of Darwin's great Anglo-Saxon migration was thus following to their legitimate conclu- sions the teachings of Jefferson and Calhoun, — the Virginia and South Carolina schools of state sovereignty, slavery and secession, — the distinctively northern column, — that entering through the Ply- mouth and Boston portals, — instinctively adhering to those princi- ples of Church and State in the contention over which it originated, — found its way along the southern shores of the Great Lakes, through northern Ohio, southern Michigan, and northern Illinois, and then, turning north and west, spread itself over the vast region beyond the great lakes, and towards the upper waters of the Miss- issippi. But it is very noteworthy how the lead and inspiration in this movement still came from the original source. While in the South it passed from Virginia to Carolina, in the North it remained in Massachusetts. Three men then came forward there, voicing more clearly than any or all others what was in the mind of the community in the way of aspiration, whether moral or political. Those three were : William Lloyd Garrison, Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams ; they were the prophetic voices of that phase of American political evolution then in process. Their messages, too, were curiously divergent ; and yet, apparently contradictory, they were, in reality, supplementary to each other. Garrison de- veloped the purely moral side of the coming issue. Webster preathed nationality, under the guise of love of the Union. Adams,
