Having thus spoken, he turned over on his blanket, and was silent. Dr. Russell assures his readers that this man only expressed the nearly unanimous feeling of the Southern people at the outbreak of the war. He had been ten weeks travelling in the Southern States, and he declared that the people had but one battle-cry,—"States' Rights, and death to those who make war upon them!" About the same time, we remember, there was a paragraph going the rounds of the newspapers which related a conversation said to have taken place between a Northern man and a Southern boy. The boy happening to use the word "country," the Northerner asked him, "What is your country?" To which the boy instantly and haughtily replied, "SOUTH CAROLINA!"
Such anecdotes as these were to most of us here at the North a revelation. The majority of the Northern people actually did not know of the existence of such a feeling as that expressed by the Carolina boy, nor of the doctrine enunciated by the dying soldier. If every boy in the Northern States old enough to understand the question had been asked, What is your country? every one of them, without a moment's hesitation, would have quietly answered in substance thus: "Why, the United States, of course";—and the only feeling excited by the question would have been one of surprise that it should have been asked. And with regard to that "battle-cry" of States' Rights, seven tenths of the voters of the North hardly knew what a Southern man meant when he pronounced the words. Thus we presented to the world the curious spectacle of a people so ignorant of one another, so little homogeneous, that nearly all on one side of an imaginary line were willing to risk their lives for an idea which the inhabitants on the other side of the line not only did not entertain, but knew nothing about. We observe something similar in the British empire. The ordinary Englishman does not know what it is of which Ireland complains, and if an Irishman is asked the name of his country, he does not pronounce any of the names which imply the merging of his native isle in the realm of Britain.
Few of us, even now, have a "realizing sense," as it is called, of the strength of the States' Rights feeling among the Southern people. Of all the Southern States in which we ever sojourned, the one that seemed to us most like a Northern State was North Carolina. We stayed some time at Raleigh, ten years ago, during the session of the Legislature, and we were struck with the large number of reasonable, intelligent, upright men who were members of that body. Of course, we expected to find Southern men all mad on one topic; but in the Legislature of North Carolina there were several individuals who could converse even on that in a rational and comfortable manner. We were a little surprised, therefore, the other day, to pick up at a book-stall in Nassau Street a work entitled:
"The North Carolina Reader, Number III. Prepared with
Special Reference to the Wants and Interests of North
Carolina. Under the Auspices of the Superintendent of Common
Schools. Containing Selections in Prose and Verse. By C.H.
Wiley. New York: A.S. Barnes and Burr."
The acute reader will at once surmise that the object of this series of school readers was to instil into the minds of the youth of North Carolina a due regard for the sacredness and blessed effects of our peculiar institution. But for once the acute reader is mistaken. No such purpose appears, at least not in Number III.; in which there are only one or two even distant allusions to that dread subject. Onesimus is not mentioned; there is no reference to Ham, nor is there any discourse upon long heels and small brains. The great, the only object of this Reader was to nourish in the children of the State the feeling which the boy expressed-when he proudly said that his country was South Carolina. Nothing can exceed the innocent, childlike manner in which this design is carried out in Number III. First, the children are favored with a series of chapters descriptive of North Carolina, written in the style of a school geography, with an occasional piece of poetry on a North Carolina subject by a North Carolina poet. Once, however, the compiler ventures to depart from his plan by inserting the lines by Sir William Jones, "What constitutes a State?" To this poem he appends a note apologizing for "breaking the thread of his discourse," upon the ground that the lines were so "applicable to the subject," that it seemed as if the author "must have been describing North Carolina." When the compiler has done cataloguing the fisheries, the rivers, the mountains, and the towns of North Carolina, he proceeds to relate its history precisely in the style of our school history books. The latter half of the volume is chiefly occupied by passages from speeches, and poems from newspapers, written by natives of North Carolina. It is impossible for us to convey an idea of the innutritiousness and the inferiority of most of these pieces. North Carolina is the great theme of orator and poet.
"We live," says one of the legislators quoted,
"in the most beautiful land that the sun of heaven ever shone upon. Yes, sir, I have heard the anecdote from Mr. Clay, that a preacher in Kentucky, when speaking of the beauties of paradise, when he desired to make his audience believe it was a place of bliss, said it was a Kentucky of a place. Sir, this preacher had never visited the western counties of North Carolina. I have spent days of rapture in looking at her scenery of unsurpassed grandeur, in hearing the roar of her magnificent waterfalls, second only to the great cataract of the North; and while I gazed for hours, lost in admiration at the power of Him who by his word created such a country, and gratitude for the blessings He had scattered upon it, I thought that if Adam and Eve, when driven from paradise, had been near this land, they would have thought themselves in the next best place to that they had left."
We do not aver that the contents of this collection are generally as ludicrous as this specimen; but we do say that the passage quoted gives a very fair idea of the spirit and quality of the book. There is scarcely one of the North Carolina pieces which a Northern man would not for one reason or another find extremely comic. One of the reading lessons is a note written fifteen years ago by Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor of the Tribune, upon the use of the long leaves of the North Carolina pine for braiding or basket-work; another is a note written to accompany a bunch of North Carolina grapes sent to an editor; and there are many other newspaper cuttings of a similar character. The editor seems to have thought nothing too trivial, nothing too ephemeral, for his purpose, provided the passage contained the name of his beloved State.
How strange all this appears to a Northern mind! Everywhere else in Christendom, teachers strive to enlarge the mental range of their pupils, readily assenting to Voltaire's well-known definition of an educated man: "One who is not satisfied to survey the universe from his parish belfry." Everywhere else, the intellectual class have some sense of the ill-consequences of "breeding in and in," and take care to infuse into their minds the vigor of new ideas and the nourishment of strange knowledge. How impossible for a Northern State to think of doing what Alabama did last winter, pass a law designed to limit the circulation in that State of Northern newspapers and periodicals! What Southern men mean by "State pride" is really not known in the Northern States. All men of every land are fond of their native place; but the pride that Northern people may feel in the State wherein they happened to be born is as subordinate to their national feeling, as the attachment of a Frenchman to his native province is to his pride in France.
Why this difference? It did not always exist. It cost New York and Massachusetts as severe a struggle to accept the Constitution of 1787 as it did Virginia. George Clinton, Governor of New York, had as much State pride as Patrick Henry, orator of Virginia, and parted as reluctantly with a portion of the sovereignty which he wielded. If it required Washington's influence and Madison's persuasive reasoning to bring Virginia into the new system, the repugnance of Massachusetts was only overcome by the combined force of Hancock's social rank and Samuel Adams's late, reluctant assent.