Six States have "seceded." Let them go. If the
Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular
government is a failure. In all the free States, and in a majority if not in
all of the slaveholding States, popular government has been sucessful. But the
experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is,
perhaps, a failure. Freedom and slavery can, perhaps, not exist side by side
under the same popular government. There probably is an “irrepressible conflict”*
between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations
may as well be formed with that as an admitted fact.
__________
* This phrase had first been used by William H. Seward in a
speech at Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 4
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