Union otherwise than as they did; yet a doubt presents itself as to the
general soundness and sincerity of their boasted notions of liberty.
Now, later on we shall have to understand the policy as to slavery on
behalf of which Lincoln stepped forward as a leader. In his own
constantly reiterated words it was a return to the position of "the
fathers," and, though he was not a professional historian, it concerns us
to know that there was sincerity at least in his intensely historical
view of politics. We have, then, to see first how "the fathers"--that
is, the most considerable men among those who won Independence and made
the Constitution--set out with a very honest view on the subject of
slavery, but with a too comfortable hope of its approaching end, which
one or two lived to see frustrated; secondly, how the men who succeeded
them were led to abandon such hopes and content themselves with a
compromise as to slavery which they trusted would at least keep the
American nation in being.

Among those who signed the Declaration of Independence there were
presumably some of Dr. Johnson's "yelpers." It mattered more that there
were sturdy people who had no idea of giving up slavery and probably did
not relish having to join in protestations about equality. Men like
Jefferson ought to have known well that their associates in South
Carolina and Georgia in particular did not share their aspirations--the
people of Georgia indeed were recent and ardent converts to the slave
system. But these sincere and insincere believers in slavery were the
exceptions; their views did not then seem to prevail even in the greatest
of the slave States, Virginia. Broadly speaking, the American opinion on
this matter in 1775 or in 1789 had gone as far ahead of English opinion,
as English opinion had in turn gone ahead of American, when, in 1833, the
year after the first Reform Bill, the English people put its hand into
its pocket and bought out its own slave owners in the West Indies. The