War was already on between abolitionism and slavery. It was idle to seek for grounds of reconciliation between convictions so utterly antagonistic and so necessarily irreconcilable. The compromisers were men crying "Peace" where there was no peace and no possibility of peace. They were visionaries seeking to reconcile sentiments that were as opposite as the poles. In opinion and sentiment as well as in physics, there are affinities that may not be resisted and antagonisms that no power can overcome. There was no flux of political agreement that could fuse Northern and Southern sentiment on the subject of slavery into one homogeneous whole--no _vehiculum_ in which the two antagonistic principles could mingle in harmony. The key to the situation, as every sincere historian must recognize, if he would interpret the events of that time aright, was the fact that this conflict was indeed "irrepressible," and that it could end only with the extinction of slavery on the one hand, or with the universal and constitutional recognition of slavery as a national institution on the other. The Compromise of 1850 was futile and a failure because it was founded upon the ignoring of this fundamental truth. CHAPTER VI UNCLE TOM'S CABIN The failure of the Compromise of 1850 to accomplish its purpose did not at first appear in the national election returns. In fact the new Free-soil party polled fewer votes in 1852 than it had cast four years before, but in the elections of the several states of the North it was steadily gaining ground precisely as in the South the extreme disunion pro-slavery party was likewise doing. Little by little the more conservative men on either side were being drawn into the radical propaganda. In 1852 there appeared in print a novel which was destined to affect the history of the Union as no other novel ever did before or since. Every historian of that epoch must reckon with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as one of the vital forces affecting the history of the time. The novel was written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who personally knew very little about slavery except by hearsay. Of necessity it abounded in inconsistencies, mistakes of facts, and impossibilities so far as its social depictions were concerned. All these things have been pointed out by criticism and need not now be recapitulated, the more because they have no historical importance whatever. But the novel made a tremendous appeal to the sentiment of humanity in antagonism to slavery. It argued no question, it offered no statistics, it presented no thesis. It simply appealed to the sentiments of men, and women, and children, for the abolition of slavery and its influence was immediate and well-nigh limitless.