248 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



have found a refuge here, no one has been so great an acquisition. He 

 arrived in this country in the year 1827, settled at Boston, where 

 he set up a swimming-school for his sujjport, and ere long took the 

 supervision of the work entitled " Encycloptedia Americana, on the 

 basis of the seventh edition of the German Conversations-Lexicon, 

 by F. Lieber, assisted by E. AVigglesworth," in thirteen volumes. 

 After the completion of this work, which was finished in 1833, we find 

 him engaged in New York in a translation of De Beaumont and De 

 Tocqueville on the Penitentiary system of the United States, and then 

 in Philadelphia in preparing a plan of education for Girard College. 

 In 1835 he received the appointment of Professor of Plistory and 

 Political Economy in the College of South Carolina. The middle of 

 his life was sjient at this post, and here his most important works were 

 written. During his residence at Columbia, the questions which agitated 

 the country grew in seriousness, and threw dark shadows ujDon the future. 

 He felt the solemnity of the crisis : his principles were immovably fixed 

 against disunion, and he was in a position to know the wishes and plans 

 of the leaders of Southern opinion. In January, 1850, having had in a 

 meeting of the Faculty of his College — as it would seem — a conversa- 

 tion on the possibility of disunion, he addressed a letter to the gentle- 

 man with whom he had conversed, from which we extract two or three 

 sentences : " No peaceful separation is possible in the nature of things, 

 even though both parties should desire it." " A war between the 

 North and the South would be one of the bitterest ever recorded," 

 " In less than twenty years we would have again an abolition party in 

 the northern parts of the southern Union ; fur anti-slavery is not an 

 a,rtificial thinsr. It lies in the nature of civilization and the course of 

 history. Slavery is a deciduous institution, which always falls at a cer- 

 tain time, as the first teeth are absorbed and give way to the second 

 and permanent teeth." " The people of the South would become pro- 

 tectionists in the highest degree, and go through all the phases of that 

 unhappy error." " If the South now complains of unsurrendered fugi- 

 tives, they would then escape by shoals ; and no exertion would be ade- 

 quate to watch the frontier such as it then would be." " A weight of 

 opinion would press upon us, which would be heavy indeed, for the 

 world is against slavery." * 



Six years and a little more after this sagacious and characteristic 

 letter was written. Dr. Lieber received an invitation to the Professor- 

 ship of Constitutional History and Public Law in Columbia College, 



* Published in the " New York Evening Post" of January 31, 1873. 



