[129] This, their judgment, appeared to be in a certain way
also the judgment of Mr. Lincoln; for he also conceived that to put
slavery where the "fathers" had left it was to put it "in the way of
ultimate extinction;" and he had, in the most famous utterance of his
life, given his forecast of the future to the effect that the country
would in time be "all free." The only logical deduction was that he, and
the Republican party which had agreed with him sufficiently to make him
president, believed that the South had no lawful recourse by which this
result, however unwelcome or ruinous, could in the long run and the
fullness of time be escaped. Under such circumstances Southern political
leaders now decided that the time for separation had come. In speaking
of their scheme they called it "secession," and said that secession was
a lawful act because the Constitution was a compact revocable by any of
the parties. They might have called it "revolution,"[130] and have
defended it upon the general right of any large body of people,
dissatisfied with the government under which they find themselves, to
cast it off. But, if the step was _revolution_, then the burden of proof
was upon them; whereas they said that _secession_ was their lawful
right, without any regard whatsoever to the motive which induced them to
exercise it.[131] Such was the character of the issue between the North
and the South prior to the first ordinance of secession.
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