Let us briefly consider the subject. On the colonial history of the Southern States, it is unnecessary to dwell. Suffice it to say, that while thoroughly imbued with the spirit of independence and taking a leading part in the struggle of 1776, in this course the South was actuated by a desire to assert its abstract rights, and to stand loyally by its sister colonies of the North, rather than by any personal grievance, or feeling of animosity towards the Mother Country. Between the Southern States themselves, there were strongly marked differences, each possessing its own distinctly individual character. But in essentials, the family likeness between them was strong enough to make any one member of the group a typical representative of the whole, so far as the outside world was concerned. Bound indissolubly together by that common bond,—the institution of slavery,—in politics they were equally united. From those early days when the American Government was in its formative stage, down to the period of the Civil War in 1861, the South stood always a solid unit for republican principles as imbodied in the Constitution of the United States, and exemplified in the cardinal Southern doctrine of “States’ Rights.” The term “democracy” as applied to the South is a total misnomer, and its application furnishes one of the many curious anomalies to be found in American political history. But this history is too tangled a skein to be unravelled here. Enough to say that the Old South was never a democracy, properly so called; on the contrary, it was an oligarchy of the most pronounced and exclusive type, its population being sharply divided into two classes, patrician and plebeian—the governing and the governed. Nay more, although nominally the entire white population belonged in the first category (and was therefore eligible for public office), practically the franchise was confined to the educated and property-holding class alone, the “poor whites” of the South being too numerically weak and insignificant to be an appreciable power in politics. Thus it came about that, from first to last, in this fundamental particular the South differed from every other section of the Republic; and this difference was the direct result of the Institution of Slavery.