Primary sources of documents published in the years prior to the advent of the U.S. Civil War affirm the growing tension between North and South over the putative power of the slave-owning states with respect to the rest of the country. For example an article appearing in 1857 in the Atlantic Monthly (12) stated that: "That the stronger half of the nation should suffer the weaker to rule over it in virtue of its weakness, that the richer region should submit to the political tyranny of its impoverished moiety because of that very poverty, is indeed a marvel and a mystery." The editors of this publication asked an important question: "Are we forever to submit to be cheated out of our national rights by an oligarchy as despicable as it is detestable, because it clothes itself in the forms of democracy, and allows us the ceremonies of choice, the name of power, and the permission to register the edicts of the sovereign" (Atlantic Monthly, 14)?
The answer to this particular question, at least from the perspective of the North, was simply that it was intolerable to allow the Southern states to continue forcing their views on slavery on the rest of the nation. Slavery was described as having shed a "baleful influence" on the history of the country and as being pursued by the Southern states to "fix slavery firmly and forever on the throne of this nation" (Atlantic Monthly, 13).
The division between the North and the South was therefore almost impossible to resolve. When Northerners thought about what slavery meant, they often found themselves thinking negatively about those who owned slaves. For example, James S. Pike, writing in The New York Tribune in January 1861 stated that "there never was such a set of arrogant and imperious rulers as the slave-driving captains of the Republic.... Such men cannot be created except by Slavery.... They will govern the country or they will destroy it if they can" (16).
Pike was ...