and threatened the property of every slave-owner in the South.
The disasters of the Southern, or what was afterward known as the States-rights, party were largely
due to temper. The habit of command, giving self-confidence and vigor of will, opened a boundless
field for extravagances. The strength of men like
Randolph and Early was their chief weakness; they
had every sense except the sense of proportion.
The mole-hill which tripped them seemed as serious
an obstacle as the distant mountain range, where a
false step would dash them to fragments; and when
at last they reached the mountain range, with its
impassable chasms, where temper was helpless, they
saw in it only a mole-hill. That men like Sloan,
the butt of the house, and like Smilie and Findley,
the ordinary representatives of an intellectual mediocrity somewhat beneath the Pennsylvanian average,
should habitually end in carrying their points, in
singular and unexpected ways, against the ablest
leaders of New England Federalism and the most
gifted masters of Virginian oratory; that they should
root up everything in their path, and end by giving
to the whole country the characteristics of their own
common-place existence,—was partly due, not to
their energy or their talents, but to the contempt
which their want of genius inspired. Not their
own wisdom, but their antagonists' errors decided
the result, and overthrew successively Church and
State in New England and a slave-owning oligarchy
