“We have for the last 12 years been going through a great and dangerous juncture. The passage is almost made and, if no new cause of difficulty should intervene, it will be successfully made. I, at present, see none but the abolition question, which however, I fear is destined to shake the country to its centre.... For the first time the bold ground has been taken that slaves have a right to petition Congress ... itself emancipation.... Our fate as a people is bound up in the question. If we yield, we will be extirpated; but if we successfully resist, we will be the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time. It is the best substratum of population in the world and one on which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.”[386] We of the South know, we did not successfully resist emancipation; were not extirpated; but do form part of “the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time.” We must realize that, no matter what was the price paid for it, emancipation was salvation for the South. It was a deliverance from the “body of death,” Reviewing our history, we find that in the same year that Calhoun, the greatest disruptive force in our politics, pronounced the dictum last quoted, a comparatively young and unknown politician, destined to be the greatest cementing force of the Union, declared— “That the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to promote than to abate its evils.”[387] In discussing this utterance of Lincoln, his latest biographer, Mr. Stephenson, who declares it reveals the dawn of his intellect, beautifully pictures how— “arise the two ideas, the faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness; that it should be slow to compel results.”[388] Going back ten years before the dawn of Lincoln’s intellect, and four prior to the declaration that the Negro question was, as he, Calhoun, saw it an African slave substratum on which great and flourishing commonwealths could be most easily and safely reared, Hayne, on the floor of the United States Senate, voiced in his own words, Lincoln’s subsequently sponsored thought. Harken to Hayne: “Thus, Sir, it appears that the Almighty in the wise order of his providence has marked out the course of events, which will not only remove all danger, but gradually and effectually and in his own good time accomplish our deliverance from what gentleman are pleased to consider as the curse of the land.”[389] In 1827, it is apparent that the Negro question was a different question than it later became to the South; and that the strengthening and possible spread of slavery was in some measure due to Calhoun’s devotion to it, over and above all other questions, even before Nullification, is evidenced by his letter to Maxcy in 1830: