Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes
    

Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes (young)

January 27, 1861.—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”¹ 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.

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¹ This phrase had first been used by William H. Seward in a speech at Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858.

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