There is only one force adequate to the destructive work--the force of false and mischievous ideas. Ideas have in them the elements of all power. They alone move the moral and social world. Penetrating every crevice of the social structure, they have the force of attraction and repulsion; they consolidate and strengthen, or, like frost and heat, they rend and crumble the hardest material, either slowly or suddenly, as circumstances and conditions may permit or require. They have in them all the terrible might, with all the explosive and dangerous quickness, which belong to the most destructive of physical forces. When, in any community, ideas are harmonious, they have an organizing power wholly independent of their soundness or of their ultimate stability; but when discordant and conflicting, they produce disorganization, ruin, and chaos.
Unfortunately for our country, opposite and hostile ideas have been growing up among us from the beginning of our national existence--nay, from the very hour when the first cargo of slaves was landed on our shores in the earliest days of our colonial history. Conflicting systems have naturally grown out of these hostile ideas, which have thus embodied themselves in the visible forms appropriate to their respective natures. The colonial authorities protested against the policy of importing slaves, which the mother country persisted in maintaining, until powerful interests were gathered around it, and opinions were thus nurtured to support and defend the fatal error. Slaveholding communities arose out of this sinister beginning; they flourished and became powerful States; and they finally presented the anomaly of maintaining a noble struggle for national independence, avowedly based upon the broadest principle of human right. They aggregated themselves, eventually, into a federal union--a political nationality founded on 'the corner stone' of liberty, and not of slavery. In view of all the circumstances, this was a wonderful result; but the old original opposition, which had been incapable of resisting slavery in the days of colonial infancy and weakness, had not yet been subdued on the day when the nation arrived at its majority and assumed the rights of manhood. The venerable patriots of the revolution were men of the most enlightened and liberal views on the subject; so much so, indeed, as to shame the degeneracy of their unworthy successors in those States which still retain the slave institution. With the general consent, in the Constitution of 1787, the germs of freedom were planted, while at the same time, apparently as a matter of course, the flourishing tree of slavery was effectually girdled, and the axe was already laid at its root. Three very simple provisions effectually secured this momentous result. The provision for stopping the slave trade in 1808, and the antagonist clause for opening wide the gates of our country to the immigration of free white men, together with that which restricted the representation of slave populations in the proportion of three to five--these cardinal provisions marked the certain doom of slavery. In the lapse of time, and with the operation of ordinary social causes, the result was as certain and inevitable as any other effect of natural laws. In spite of the universal prevalence of slavery at first, free labor pushed itself forward and won its way, until, in more than half the original States, slave labor had receded before it and disappeared forever. The wisdom of those great fundamental provisions of our Constitution has been fully vindicated by the results of eighty years' experience. They have worked smoothly and progressively, in perfect conformity with that universal social law which, has made slavery a temporary and transitional institution wherever it has existed among civilized nations.