THE UNITED STATES DEMOCRATIC REVIEW. MARCH, 18 5 6. THE UNION-THE DANGERS WHICH BESET IT. NUMBER THREE. IN our last number we referred to the fact, that slavery, religious bigotry, and native prejudices, were the three agitating subjects which were shaking the American Union to its centre, with a violence that threatened to break it to pieces. In the conclusion of that article we intimated our purpose to examine those questions, in their political aspect, and we now proceed to execute that purpose, not with a view to discuss it as a moral or religious question, but simply as a subject of controversy between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. From the intense excitement which now rages in some of the non-slaveholding States upon this subject, one would suppose that this institution had been recently established. One who had never read history, sacred or profane, who hears the babblings, vociferations, and denunciations of Northern fanatics, would not for a moment suppose that domestic slavery ever existed in any country but this, or in any other age of the world. Yet, he who is familiar with sacred or profane history can not but know that, in diversified forms, it has |