The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862: Devoted to Literature and National PolicyVarious
History
The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862: Devoted to Literature and National Policy
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; United States -- Politics and government -- 19th century -- Periodicals
III. And this brings me to a vital point, which Europeans have seemed
determined not to comprehend--that of the extremely artificial and
fragile character of the political structure which our architects of
national ruin are laboring to construct. Mr. Chancellor Gladstone is
pleased to favor us with his opinion that Slavery cannot long survive
the recognition and perfect establishment of the Southern Confederacy. I
beg leave to assure him, in turn, that the Confederacy would not long
survive the downfall of Slavery. Let Slavery fall, and a million of
bayonets could not keep the North and South disunited even twenty years.
Apart from Slavery and its fancied necessities, there is not a
Disunionist between New Brunswick and Mexico, Canada and Cuba. The Union
is the darling of our affections, the seal of our security, the
palladium of our strength. No American ever tolerated the idea of
disunion except as he intensely loved or hated Slavery, and regarded the
Union as an obstacle to the realization of his wishes respecting it.
Were Slavery universal and supreme among us, or were it abolished and
its influence effaced, you could find more Thugs in Scotland than
Disunionists in America.
IV. And here your statesmen are making a mistake which some of them will
live to realize and rue. They suppose that our country, once fairly
divided and arrayed under two hostile governments, recognizing and no
longer at war with each other, must ever thereafter _remain_ divided.
They never reckoned more wildly. Were their wishes fully realized this
day, and the Confederacy an undisputed fact, a party would instantly
arise--nay, a party already exists--throughout the country, demanding
reunion on any terms. Archbishop Hughes has already in either hemisphere
struck the keynote of this cry. He truly says that our country cannot be
permanently divided. He unworthily adds that, if it cannot be united
under the old Constitution, it must be under a new one--in other words,
under that of the Confederacy. The Democratic party of the Free States,
abandoning the creed of its founders, which has lately ruled the Union
by virtue of a close alliance with the Slave Power of the South,--would,
the day after we had made peace by acknowledging the Southern
Confederacy, reorganize and reagitate under the banner of
'Reconstruction.' Hatred to negroes is the talisman whereby it secures
the votes by pandering to the prejudices of the most ignorant and
vicious Whites--by hostility to negro immigration (from the South),
negro suffrage, negro competition in the labor market, and to negro
humanity in general. That Slavery is the natural and fit condition of
negroes everywhere and at all times--that the abolition of Southern
Slavery would be a great calamity to the white laborers of the
North--such is the political philosophy assiduously dispensed and
greedily imbibed in the grogshops and 'back slums' of every Northern
city, and which politicians and journalists pretending to sense and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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