The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet ItHelper, Hinton Rowan
History
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
Helper, Hinton Rowan
Slavery -- United States
In addition to the reasons which we have already assigned why no slavocrat
should, in the future, be elected to any office whatever, there are others
that deserve to be carefully considered. Among these may be mentioned the
illbreeding and the ruffianism of slaveholding officials. Tedious indeed
would be the task to enumerate all the homicides, duels, assaults and
batteries, and other crimes, of which they are the authors in the course
of a single year. To the general reader their career at the seat of
government is well known; there, on frequent occasions, choking with rage
at seeing their wretched sophistries scattered to the winds by the sound,
logical reasoning of the champions of Freedom, they have overstepped the
bounds of common decency, vacated the chair of honorable controversy, and,
in the most brutal and cowardly manner, assailed their unarmed opponents
with bludgeons, bowie knives and pistols. Compared with some of their
barbarisms at home, however, their frenzied onslaughts at the national
Capital have been but the simplest breaches of civil deportment; and it
is only for the purpose of avoiding personalities that we now refrain from
divulging a few instances of the unparalleled atrocities which they have
perpetrated in legislative halls South of the Potomac. Nor is it alone in
the national and State legislatures that they substitute brute force for
genteel behavior and acuteness of intellect. Neither court-houses nor
public streets, hotels nor private dwellings, rum-holes nor law-offices,
are held sacred from their murderous conflicts. About certain silly
abstractions that no practical business man ever allows to occupy his time
or attention, they are eternally wrangling; and thus it is that
rencounters, duels, homicides, and other demonstrations of personal
violence, have become so popular in all slaveholding communities. A few
years of entire freedom from the cares and perplexities of public life,
would, we have no doubt, greatly improve both their manners and their
morals; and we suggest that it is a Christian duty, which devolves on the
non-slaveholders of the South, to disrobe them of the mantle of office,
which they have so long worn with disgrace to themselves, injustice to
their constituents, and ruin to their country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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