Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and wrath. Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white population--the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them--are ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest attributes--confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had created under the very ribs of the republic.