It was, however, impossible that the spirit of liberty should be so all-pervading and not in time be felt to extend to all men—even to the slaves; but the growth of the idea was slow, and it was so inextricably bound up with party questions that it was difficult to consider it on its own merits. To show this, it is only necessary to recall that, in 1832, Virginia, through her Legislature, came within one vote of abolishing slavery within her borders, and that, in 1835, William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob—an outrage which he says was planned and executed, not by the rabble or workingmen, but “by gentlemen of property and standing from all parts of the city.”[5] Fugitive-slave laws found their first examples in the colonial treaties of Massachusetts; yet in time fugitive-slave laws and the attempt to enforce them against the sentiment of communities where slavery had passed away played their part in fostering a sentiment of championship of the Negro race. Then came “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was the nail that, in the hands of a woman, fastened Sisera to the ground. It presented only one side of the question and did more, perhaps, than any one thing that ever occurred to precipitate the war. It aroused and crystallized feeling against the South throughout the world. For the first time, the world had the imaginable horrors of slavery presented in a manner that appealed alike to old and young, the learned and the ignorant, the high-born and the lowly. It blackened the fame of the Southern people in the eyes of the North and fixed in the mind of the North a concept not only of the institution of slavery, but of the Southern people, which lasted for more than a generation, and has only begun of late, in the light of a fuller knowledge, to be dislodged.[6] III Mr. Lincoln has been so generally declared to be the emancipator of the Negro race that it is probable the facts in all their significance will never be generally received. The abolition of slavery was no doubt his desire; but the preservation of the Union was his passion. And, whatever Mr. Lincoln may have felt on the subject of emancipation, he was too good a lawyer and too sound a statesman to act with the inconsiderate haste that has usually been accredited him. It was rather what he might do than what he actually did that alarmed the South and brought about secession. And the menace of destruction of the Union soon demanded all his energies and forced him to relegate to the background even the emancipation of the slaves.[7]