The beginning of the year 1860 found the people of the United States in the enjoyment of as great a measure of prosperity as they had ever known. It was to close with a condition of feeling between the two sections of the Union entirely fatal to its peace and threatening to its perpetuity. In the future of our country there will come a time when our posterity will ask, why should there ever have been any “North” or any “South,” in the sense in which those divisions have been marked in so long a period of our national history. When the inquirer learns that from the time of the formation and establishment of the Constitution of the United States, the existence of slavery in certain States was nearly the sole cause of the sectional antagonism typified by those terms, he will have to trace, through various settlements, the successive adjustments of questions which related to this one dangerous and irritating subject. This portion of our national history is divided into distinct stages, at each of which some thing intended to be definite and final was reached. It is also filled by the disastrous influence of causes which unsettled what had once been determined as a series of compacts between the sections; causes which continued to operate until the year that witnessed the beginning of a great catastrophe. The Constitution of the United States, so far as it related in any way to the condition of slavery, was the result of agreements and adjustments between the Northern and the Southern States, which have been called “compromises.” It is not material to the present purpose to consider either the moral justification for these arrangements, or whether there was an equality or an inequality as between the two sections, in what they respectively gained or conceded. Both sections gained the Union of the whole country under a system of government better adapted to secure its welfare and happiness than it had known before; and what this system promised was abundantly fulfilled. The precise equivalent which the Southern States received, by the settlement made in the formation of the Constitution, was the recognition of slavery as a condition of portions of their population by a right exclusively dependent upon their own local law, and exclusively under their own control as a right of property; and to this right of property was annexed a stipulation that the master might follow his slave from the State whence he had escaped into any other State, and require him to be given up, even if the law of that other State did not recognize the condition of servitude. One other concession was made by the Northern States: that although the slaves of the Southern States were regarded as property, they should be so far considered as persons as to be reckoned in a certain ratio in fixing the basis of representation in the popular branch of Congress, and by consequence in fixing the electoral vote of the State in the choice of a President of the United States.