But the Southern Whites hate us vehemently. That is unfortunately true of what would seem to be a large majority of them. Misled by artful demagogues--excited by charges of Northern rapacity, perfidy, outrage, and venom, to which no contradiction in their hearing is permitted--the Poor Whites of the South really believe that the North is waging against them an unprovoked and fiendish, war of subjugation and rapine. Of course, they abhor us, and invoke all manner of curses on our heads. But their hatred rests upon and is impelled by egregious falsehoods, and will vanish when those falsehoods shall have been exposed and their influence dissipated. The Whisky Rebels of Western Pennsylvania intensely hated the rule of George Washington; but their rebellion being crushed, all trace of the bitterness it engendered soon faded away. As to the aristocracy of the South, it understands the case far better, though individuals among its members are misled. The majority are fighting for the extension and perpetuation of that Heaven-defying system which is at once the idol and the bane of the South--for that 'peculiar institution' which makes one half the community helpless victims to the pride, indolence, avarice, and lust of the other half. The aristocracy are fighting for Slavery--neither less nor more--and they fight bravely, desperately. Their existence as a privileged order has been recklessly staked on the issue of the contest, and they mean to triumph at any cost. To suppose that they can be vanquished yet leave their bloody idol intact--that they can be compelled to reenter 'the Union as it was,' and send their Slidells, Hammonds, Howell Cobbs, and Masons, back to a Union Congress--is one of the wildest dreams that ever flitted through a sane mind. Reunion or Disunion is possible; a restoration of 'the Union as it was,' is as impracticable as a return of the Eleventh Century or a replacement of the New World in the condition wherein Columbus found it. The Southern aristocracy must triumph or cease as an aristocracy to exist. A flogged slaveholder is an anomaly that can not endure; he can not rule his chattels if they know that he has succumbed to a force that he would gladly have defied but could no longer resist. 'Poor White trash' may endure and repay the contempt of their servile neighbors, but a man-owning aristocracy that has fought and been vanquished, can no longer command the respect or the obedience of its chattels.