'For the last ten years an angry controversy has existed upon this question of Slavery. The minds of the people of the South have been deceived by the artful representations of demagogues, who have assured them that the people of the North were determined to bring the power of this Government to bear upon them for the purpose of crushing out this institution of slavery. I ask you, is there any truth in this charge? Has the Government of the United States, in any single instance, by any one solitary act, interfered with the institutions of the South? No, not in one.'
But let us go behind the symptoms—let us dive deeper than the superficial manifestations—let us ask why is it that the South were so specially disaffected by the election of a given individual, or the success of a given political party, to an extent and with an expression given to that disaffection wholly disproportionate to any such cause, and wholly unknown to the political usages of the land? Why is the South susceptible to this intense degree of offence at the ordinary contingency of defeat in a political encounter? Why, again, does the persistent discussion or agitation of any subject tend so specially to inflame the Southern mind beyond all the ordinary limits of moderation—to the denial of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and finally of the right of national existence itself to the North—except in conformity with preconceived opinions and theories of its own? Why were they of the South standing ready, as to their mental posture, for any or every rash and unadvised step? Why, again, are the Southern people uneducated and ignorant, as the predominant fact respecting a majority of their population? Why is the state of popular information in that whole region of a nominally free country, such as to make it an easy thing to impose upon their credulity and instruct them into a full belief in the most absurd and monstrous fabrications, or falsifications of the truth? Why were the ordinary sources of information excluded from their minds, more than from ours, or from the population of any other country? Why this fatal facility on the part of the Southern public for being misled by the designing purposes of ambitious demagogues; imbued with unjust prejudices; deluded into a murderous assault upon their best friends, and into the infliction of the most serious political injury upon themselves? Why, as a people, are they prompt to rush from the pursuits of peace into all the horrors and contingencies of war?—from the enjoyment of political freedom, at least nominal and apparent, into the arms of a military despotism, the natural and necessary ultimatum of the course which they have chosen to adopt?
The one and sole answer to all these questions is, Slavery. Some one has said, in speaking of the present crisis, that the sentiment of loyalty has never been prevalent at the South. This is a grand mistake. No people on the surface of the planet have more sincerely felt or more invariably and unflinchingly demonstrated loyalty than they. But it is not loyalty to the American Government, nor indeed to any political institutions whatsoever. It is loyalty to slavery and to cotton. No other ideas exist, with any marked prominence, at the South. The Northern people have never understood the South, and their greatest danger in the present collision results from that ignorance. The difference between the two peoples is indeed so wide that it is not equalled by that which exists between any two nations of Europe—if we except, perhaps, the Western nations and the Turks. The single institution of slavery has, for the last sixty or seventy years, taken absolute possession of the Southern mind, and moulded it in all ways to its own will. Everything is tolerated which does not interfere with it; nothing whatsoever is tolerated which does. No system of despotism was ever established on earth so thorough, so efficient, so all-seeing, so watchful, so permeating, so unscrupulous, and so determined.
The inherent, vital principle of slavery is irresponsible, despotic rule. The child is born into the exercise of that right; his whole mental constitution is imbued with its exercise. Hence for twenty or thirty years—not by virtue of law, but against law—the mails have been searched throughout the South for incendiary matter, with a strictness of censorship unknown to any Government of Europe. Northern men and Europeans immigrating to the South have uniformly been quietly dragooned and terrorized into the acceptance of theories and usages wholly unknown to any free country;—quietly, only because the occasion for doing the same thing violently and barbarously had not yet arrived.
The two civilizations, North and South, are wholly unlike. Without the slavery of four millions of men, to be kept in subjection by a conspiracy to that effect, on the part of the whole free population—the lack of fidelity to which conspiracy is the only treason known in those regions—the existence of a people like the inhabitants of the Southern States would be a riddle incapable of solution. Slavery itself, is a remnant of barbarism overlapping the period of civilization; but, unlike the slaveries of the barbaric ages, American slavery has been stimulated into all the enterprising and audacious energy of this advanced and progressive age. It is an engine of ancient barbarism worked by the steam of modern intelligence. The character of the people which has been created under this rare and anomalous state of things is alike rare and anomalous. No other people ever so commingled in themselves the elements of barbarous and even savage life with traits of the highest civilization. No other community were ever so instinct with the life of the worst ages of the past, and so endowed with the physical and intellectual potencies of the present. The national character of the South is that of the gentlemanly blackleg, bully, and desperado. Courteous when polished, but always overbearing; pretentious of a conventional sense of honor—which consists solely in a readiness to fight in the duel, the brawl, or the regular campaign, and to take offence on every occasion; with no trace of that modesty or delicacy of sentiment which constitutes the soul of true honor; ambitious, unscrupulous, bold; dashing and expert; with absolutely no restrictions from conscience, routine, or the ordinary suggestions of prudence; false and, like all braggarts, cowardly when beaten; confident of their own strength until brought to the severest tests; capable of endurance and shifts of all kinds; awaiting none of the usual conditions of success—the Southern man and the Southern people are neither comfortable neighbors in a state of peace, nor enemies to be slightly considered or despised in war.
The anomalous character of Southern society, it cannot be too often repeated, is not understood and cannot be understood by the people of the North, or of Europe, otherwise than through the sharp experience of hostile and actual contact; nor otherwise than in the light of the inherent tendency and necessary educational influences of the one institution of slavery. Of the whole South, in degree, and of the Southwestern States preëminently, it may be said as a whole description in a single form of expression: They know no other virtue than brute physical courage, and no other crime than abolitionism or negro-stealing.
All this is said, not for the purpose of blackening the South, not from partisan rancor or local prejudice, or exaggerated patriotic zeal, but because it is true. It is not true, however, of the whole population of the South, nor true, perhaps, in the absolute sense of any portion. It is impossible to characterize any people without a portion of individual injustice, or to state the drift of an individual character even, without a like injustice to better traits, adverse to the general drift, and which, to constitute a complete inventory of national or personal attributes, should be enumerated. There is at the South a large counterpoise, therefore, of adverse statement, which might be, and should be made if the object of the present writing were a complete analysis of the subject. It is, however, not so, but a statement of the preponderance of public character and opinion in those States. As a people they have their countervailing side of advantage—a great deal of amiability and refinement in certain neighborhoods, so long as their inherent right of domination is not disputed. Men and women are found, all over the South, who as individuals are better than the institution by which their characters are affected, and whose native goodness could not be wholly spoiled by its adverse operation. Slavery, too, offers certain advantages for some special kinds of culture. We of the North, on the other hand, have our own vices of a kind not to be disguised nor denied; so that the present statement should not be mistaken for an attempt to characterize in full either population. It is simply perceived that the grand distinctive drift of Southern society is directly away from the democratic moorings of our favorite republican institutions; is rapid in its current and irresistible in its momentum; and that already the divergency attained between the political and popular character of the people at the North and the South is immense; that these constantly widening tendencies—one in behalf of more and more practical enlargement of the liberty of the individual; the other backward and downward toward the despotic political dogmas and practices of the ignorant and benighted past—have proceeded altogether beyond anything which has been seen and recognized by the people of the North; and that, consequently, the whole North has been acting under a misapprehension.
The spirit of the South is and has been belligerent, rancorous, and unscrupulous. The idea of settling any question by the discussion of principles, by mutual concessions, by the understanding, admission, and defence of the rights of each, is not in all their thoughts. They are inherently and essentially invaders and conquerors, in disposition, and so far as it might chance to prove for them feasible, would ever be so in fact. War with them is therefore no matter of child's play, no matter of courtesy or chivalry toward enemies, except from a pompous and theatrical show of a knightly character, which they do not possess;—it is simply a question of pillaging and enslaving, without let or hindrance from moral or humanitary considerations, to any extent to which they may find, by the experiment now inaugurated, their physical power to extend. The North, let it be repeated, entered into this war under a misapprehension of the whole state of the case. It is at the present hour, to a fearful extent, under the same misapprehension. There is still a belief prevailing that the South only needs to be coaxed or treated kindly or magnanimously to be convinced that she has mistaken the North; that she has not the grievances to complain of which she supposes she has, and that she can yet obtain just and equitable treatment from us. There is a tacit assumption in the minds of men that she must be content to receive the usage at our hands which we are conscious that we are ready to bestow, and which has in it no touch of aggressive and unjust intention. It is not realized that the spirit of the South, in respect to the North, in respect to Mexico, in respect to the islands of the sea, and—should their power prove proportionate to their unscrupulous piratical aspirations—in respect to all the nations of the earth, is that of the burglar and the highwayman. It is not realized that the institution of slavery—itself essential robbery of the rights of man; covering the area of half a continent, and the number of four millions of subjects; planted in the midst of an intellectually enlightened people, whose moral sense it has utterly sapped—is essentially a great educational system, as all-pervading and influential over the minds of the whole population as the common schools of New England; and that this grand educational force tends toward and culminates in this same tendency toward robbery and the suppression of human rights or the individual and national rights of all other people—expressed in a collective and belligerent way. It is not, as said before, that all men at the South are of this filibustering cast; but the bold, enterprising, and leading class of the population are so, and the remainder are passive in their hands. Virtually and practically, therefore, the South are a nation of people having far more relationship in thought and purpose with the old Romans during the period of the republic and the empire, or with the more modern Goths and Vandals and Huns, than they have with the England or New England of to-day.
It is such a people, planted on our borders and aroused for the first time to an exhibition on a large scale of those abiding and augmenting national attributes and propensities which have thus been indicated, with whom we are now brought into hostile array. They are at present trying their hand at the collective and organic activities of a national cutthroatism which, in an individual and sporadic way, has for many years past constituted the national life of that people. Who at the North, at the commencement of the war, impressively understood these facts? Who even now sees and knows, as the fact is, that the military success of Jefferson Davis; that his triumphant march on Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—as they of the South threaten, and intend if they have the power, and have already twice unsuccessfully attempted—would terminate not, in a separation of these States by a permanent disruption of the old Union; nor in new compromises of any kind whatsoever; but in the absolute conquest of the whole North—not conquest even in any sense now understood among civilized people; but conquest with more than all the horrors which fourteen centuries ago were visited on Southern Europe by the overwhelming avalanche of Northern barbarian invasion?—that in that event, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of locomotion without question, freedom in any sense which makes life valuable to the man once educated into the conception of freedom, is lost?—that the whole progress of modern civilization and development, as it has been working itself out in the Northern American States, would not only be diverted from its course, but positively reversed and made to contribute all its accumulations of power to the building up, not of the temple of Freedom for the blessing of the nations, but of an infernal pantheon of Despotism and human oppression?
The North was forced, reluctantly and unwillingly, into this war: with her as yet it has hardly become a matter of earnest. She has endeavored to carry it on considerately and tenderly, for the well-being of the South as well as of the North, much in the spirit of a quiet Quaker gentleman unexpectedly set upon by a drunken rowdy, 'spoiling for a fight,' and whom in his benevolence and surprise, he is anxious indeed to restrain, but without inflicting on him serious injury. In an especial degree was this tenderness felt on the part of the Government and people of the North toward that peculiar institution of the South which is distinctively known to be, in some way, fundamentally related to this unprovoked and unreasonable attack. While the South was attributing to the whole North a rabid abolitionism; while the North itself was half suspecting that it had committed some wrong in the excess of its devotion to human rights; the simple fact on the contrary was, that the whole North had been and was still 'psychologized' into a positive respect for slavery, and for slaves as property, which we feel for no other species of property whatsoever. The existence of this sentiment of veneration for what our Abolition apostles have for some years been denominating the 'sum of all villanies,' is a curious fact in the spiritual history of our people, which had very generally escaped critical observation.