But these were passing away, and a new people were coming into their places. The effects of a common cause, a common danger, and a united success, were not felt by these. New interests excited new aspirations. The nation's peril was past, and she was one of the great powers of the earth, and acknowledged as such. She had triumphantly passed through a second war with her unnatural mother, in which New England, as a people, had reaped no glory. In the midst of the struggle, she had called a convention of her people, with a view of withdrawing from the Union. Her people had invited the enemy, with their blue-light signals, to enter the harbor they were blockading, and where the American ships, under the command of one of our most gallant commanders, had sought refuge. They were sorely chagrined, and full of wrath. They hated the South and her people. It was growing, and they were nursing it. Even then we were a divided people, with every interest conserving to unite us—the South producing and consuming; the North manufacturing, carrying, and selling for, and to, the South. The harmony of commerce, and the harmony of interest, had lost its power, and we were a divided people. The breach widened, war followed, and ruin riots over the land. The South was the weaker, and went down; the North was the stronger, and triumphed—and the day of her vengeance has come.
In that remote time, the chase after the almighty dollar had commenced, and especially in New England, where every sentiment was subordinate to this. Patriotism was a secondary sentiment. Hypocritical pretension to the purity of religion was used to cover the vilest practices, and to shield from public indignation men who, praying, pressed into their service the vilest means to make haste to be rich. The sordid parsimony of ninety-hundredths of the population shut out every sentiment of generosity, and rooted from the heart every emotion honorable to human nature. Neighborhood intercourse was poisoned with selfishness, and the effort to overreach, and make money out of, the ignorance or necessities of these, was universal. These degrading practices crept into every business, and petty frauds soon became designated as Yankee tricks. There was nothing ennobling in their pursuits. The honorable profession of law dwindled into pettifogging tricks. Commerce was degraded in their hands by fraud and chicanery. The pernicious and grasping nature everywhere cultivated, soon fastened upon the features. Their eyes were pale, their features lank and hard, and the stony nature was apparent in the icy coldness of manner, in the deceitful grin, and lip-laugh, which the eye never shared, and which was only affected, when interest prompted, or the started suspicions of an intended victim warned them to be wary. The climate, and the inhospitable and ungenerous soil, seemed to impart to the people their own natures.
The men were all growing sharp, and the women, cold and passionless; the soul appeared to shrivel and sink into induration, and the whole people were growing into a nation of cheats and dastards. Such was the promise for the people of New England, in 1820. Has it not been realized in the years of the recent intestine war? The incentive held out to her people to volunteer into her armies, was the plunder of the South. The world has never witnessed such rapacity for gain as marked the armies of the United States in their march through the South. Religion and humanity were lost sight of in the general scramble for the goods and the money of the Southern people. Rings were snatched from the fingers of ladies and torn from their ears; their wardrobes plundered and forwarded to expectant families at home; graves were violated for the plates of gold and silver that might be found upon the coffins; the dead bodies of women and men were unshrouded after exhumation, to search in the coffins and shrouds to see if valuables were not here concealed; and, in numerous instances, the teeth were torn from the skeleton mouths of the dead for the gold plugs, or gold plates that might be found there. Nor was this heathenish rapacity confined to the common soldier; the commanders and subalterns participated with acquisitive eagerness, sharing fully with their commands the hellish instincts of their race.
They professed to come to liberate the slave, and they uniformly robbed or swindled him of every valuable he might possess—even little children were stripped of their garments, as trophies of war, to be forwarded home for the wear of embryo Puritans, as an example for them in future. Such are the Yankees of 1863-4, and '67. They now hold control of the nation; but her mighty heart is sore under their oppression. She is beginning to writhe. It will not be long, before with a mighty effort she will burst the bonds these people have tied about her limbs, will reassert the freedom of her children, and scourge their oppressors with a whip of scorpions.
Such men as Talmadge, Humphries, and Wolcott are no more to be found in New England. The animus of these men is no longer with these people. The work of change is complete. Nothing remains of their religion but its semblance—the fanaticism of Cotton Mather, without his sincerity—the persecuting spirit of Cotton, without the sincerity of his motives. Every tie that once united the descendants of the Norman with those of the Saxon is broken. They are two in interest, two in feeling, two in blood, and two in hatred. For a time they may dwell together, but not in unison; for they have nothing in common but hatred. Its fruit is discord, and the day is not distant, when these irreconcilable elements must be ruled with a power despotic as independent, whose will must be law unto both. It is painful to look back fifty years and contrast the harmony then pervading every class of every section with the discord and bitterness of hate which substitutes it to day. Then, the national airs of "Hail Columbia" and "Yankee Doodle" thrilled home to the heart of every American. To-day, they are only heard in one half of the Union to be cursed and execrated. To ask a lady to play one of these airs upon the harp or piano, from the Rio Grande to the Potomac, would be resented as an insult. The fame of Washington and John Hancock mingled as the united nations; but the conduct of the sons of the Puritan fathers has stolen the respect for them from the heart of half of the nation; and now, even the once glorious name of Daniel Webster stirs no enthusiasm in the bosoms which once beat joyfully to his praise, as it came to them from New England. Those who from party purposes proclaim peace and good will, only deceive the world, not themselves, or the people of the South. Peace there is; but good will, none. When asked to be given, memory turns to the battle-fields upon Southern soil, the bloody graves where the chosen spirits of the South are sleeping, and the heart burns with indignant hatred. Generations may come and pass away, but this hatred, this cursed memory of oppressive wrong will live on. The mothers of to-day make for their infants a tradition of these memories, and it will be transmitted as the highlander's cross of fire, from clan to clan, in burning brightness, for a thousand years. The graveyards will no more perish than the legends of the war that made them. They are in our midst, our children, the kindred of all are there—and those who are to come will go there—and their mothers, as Hamilcar did, will make them upon these green graves swear eternal hatred to those who with their vengeance filled these sacred vaults.
We are expected to love those whose hands are red with the blood of our children; to take to our bosoms the murderers and robbers who have slain upon the soil of their nativity our people, and who have robbed our homes and devastated our country; who have fattened Southern soil with Southern blood, and enriched their homes with the stolen wealth of ours. Are we not men, and manly? Do we feel as men? and is not this insult to manliness, and a vile mockery to the feelings of men? We can never forget—we will never forgive, and we will wait; for when the opportunity shall come, as come it will, we will avenge the damning wrong.
This may be unchristian, but it is natural—nature is of God and will assert herself. No mawkish pretension, no hypocritical cant, can repress the natural feelings of the heart: its loves and resentments are its strongest passions, and the love that we bore for our children and kindred kindles to greater vigor in the hatred we bear for their murderers.
CONGRESS IN ITS BRIGHTEST DAYS.
Missouri Compromise—John Randolph's Juba—Mr. Macon—Holmes and Crawford—Mr. Clay's Influence—James Barbour—Philip P. Barbour—Mr. Pinkney—Mr. Beecher, of Ohio—"Cuckoo, Cuckoo!"—National Roads— William Lowndes—William Roscoe—Duke of Argyle—Louis McLean—Whig and Democratic Parties.