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Thus, under the direct influence of the Cotton dynasty, the whole Southern tone on this subject has undergone a change. Slavery is no longer deplored as a necessary evil, but it is maintained as in all respects a substantial good. One of the logical necessities of a thorough slave-system is, in at least the slave-portion of the people, extreme ignorance.
If I had been raised in South Carolina, loving the slave-system because I had grown up with it and thinking more of my State than of the American nation, maybe I'd have followed Jeff Davis. I'm not saying there's no honesty in the South, I'm not saying there's not truth on their side, but I do say that ours is the bigger truth and the better truth.
One year before, I had been in the great Charleston Club, when the question of the perpetuity of the slave-system was discussed; when, indeed, an elaborate essay was read by one of the members, in which the ground was taken, that the dark cloud would sink away to the southwest, to Central America perhaps, from whence the slave population would find an exodus across the water to Africa; and of twenty members present, seventeen agreed with the essayist.
Even if we grant martial intrepidity to the members of the Slavocracy, the present war proves that the system of Slavery is not one which develops martial virtues among the "free whites" it has cajoled or forced into its hateful service. Indeed, the armies of Jefferson Davis are weak on the same principle on which the slave-system is weak.
The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics of antiquity in general the slave-system were more conspicuous in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families or of wealthy upstarts.
This, and not the mere fact that they were secessionists, insurgents, rebels, or whatever harder term may be forthcoming, is the reason why the writer disliked the revolt of the Southern States, and wished it to come to nought; and corresponding facts regarding the Northern States, that they were simply upholding a constitutional act performed by the nation at large, were contending for the majestic present and the magnificent future of a great and free republic, were arrayed against the extension of slavery, and might, by the force of circumstances and the growth of ideas, find themselves called up even to exterminate the existing slave-system, these were the facts which commanded his homage to the Northern cause, not merely that they were the assertors of authority against innovation.
Who that pities them wisely would not all the more firmly grasp that sword which alone can deliver them? Nor has the slave-system been any worse than it must be, in pushing us and them to the present pass. So bad it must be, or cease to be at all. All things obey their nature.
No artificial force of serious value was applied to production or transportation, and when society developed itself so rapidly in political and social lines, it had no other means of keeping its economy on the same level than to extend its slave-system and its fetish-system to the utmost.
Fair Italy, though still possessing her fatal gift of beauty, though still suffering many things, is no longer the prey of foreign unloved rulers, but has become a nation, a mere "geographical expression" no longer; Germany, whose many little princedoms were once a favourite theme of British mockery, is now one great and formidable empire; the power of Russia has, despite the Crimean check, continued to expand, while desperate internal struggles have shaken that half-developed people, proving fatal to the gentle successor of Nicholas, the emancipator of the Russian serfs, and often threatening the life of his successors; and the once formidable American slave-system has been swept away, with appalling loss of human life; a second President of the United States has fallen by the hand of an assassin; and new difficulties, scarce inferior to those connected with slavery, have followed on its abolition.
The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics of antiquity in general the slave-system were more conspicuous in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families or of wealthy upstarts.
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