The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 1, July, 1862Various
History
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 1, July, 1862
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; United States -- Politics and government -- 19th century -- Periodicals
Even now, it is amazing to see how the leaders among the Democracy,
while pecking the South with the bill, continue to fondle it with the
wing. Again and again, since the war began, they have humiliated the
North and encouraged the desperate foe by efforts at peace-parties,
conciliations, outcries for amnesty, and entreaties not to 'exasperate'
the enemy. They have urged and advocated the maintenance of slavery, the
great cause of Southern arrogance and secession, with as much zeal as
any Southron of them all, and fiercely deprecated any allusion to a
subject which can no more he kept from consciousness than can a deadly
and madly irritating cancer. Every suggestion, even the mildest and most
equitable, for arranging this difficulty, has been stigmatized by them
as out of place and time, while their press has, without exception, as
we believe, given currency to statements denouncing directly as
swindlers and prostitutes the innocent and well-meaning men and women
who went South with the sole object of clothing, nursing, and teaching
the disorganized masses of blacks set free by our army. In all of this,
we have a melancholy illustration of the difficulty with which
unthinking men of the blind mass which rolls itself away into 'parties,'
and follows its leaders, embrace new truths or shake off old habits of
slavery.
While the modern Democratic party firmly believed--as its majority still
seems to--that all this trouble was caused solely by the Abolitionists,
and simply for the sake of liberating some four millions of blacks, they
had at least some color for their iron conservatism. European humanity
did not agree with us; but we of America are more tropical in our
feelings, and so we made up our minds that it _was_ too bad to cut one
another's throats for the sake of benefiting certain 'fat and lazy
niggers,' who were probably rather better off as chattels than as free
men. But it is not from this point of view that the world is now
beginning to view the subject. Common-sense has ascertained clearly
enough that without the agitation of Abolition, the South would have
become intolerable and tyrannical--it was imperious, sectional, and
arrogant in the days of its weakness, while the Abolitionists scarcely
existed, and given to secession for any and every cause. The insolent,
individual independence which prompted the wearing of weapons, wild law
and wild life, free from mutual social obligations, contained within
itself the germs of withdrawal from a civilized and superior people and
a stable government. For such men, one pretense served as well as
another. They of South-Carolina employed Nullification long before they
dreamed of Anti-Abolition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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