n the list of legitimate commercial
pursuits, and become more extensive than it was in those days when it
was defended by bishops and kings' sons in the British House of Lords.
That this is not an unfounded opinion will be admitted by those who
recollect that the London "Times," that representative of the average
English mind, but recently published articles that could mean nothing
less than a desire to revive the old system of slavery, with all that
should be necessary to maintain it in force; that Mr. Carlyle is an
advocate of the oppression of negroes; and that the French Government
at one time seemed disposed to have resort to a course that must, if
adopted, have converted Africa into a storehouse of slaves.

Our slaveholders were not blind to this altered state of the European
mind, of which they availed themselves, and of which, in a certain
sense, they had the best of all rights to avail themselves, for it was
largely their own work. At the same time that England abolished slavery
in her dominions, the chief Nullifiers, who were the fathers of the
Secession Rebellion, assumed the position that negro slavery was good in
itself, and that it was the duty of white men to uphold and to extend
it. This was done by Governor McDuffie, of South Carolina, in 1834,
and it was warmly approved by many Southern men, as well out of South
Carolina as in that most fanatical of States, but generally condemned by
the Democrats of that time, though now it is not uncommon to find men
in the North who accept all that the old Nullifier put forward as a new
truth eight-and-twenty years ago. Earnestly and zealously, and with no
small amount of talent, the friends of slavery labored to impose their
views upon the entire Southern mind,--and that not so much because they
loved slavery for itself as because they knew, that, if the slaveholding
interest could be placed in opposition to the Federal Union, that Union
might be destroyed. They were fanatics in their attachment to slavery,
but even their fanaticism was secondary to their hatred of that
power which, as represented by Andrew Jackson, had trampled down
Nullification, and compelled Carolina and Calhoun to retreat from cannon
and the gallows. Mr. Rhett, then Mr. Barnwell Smith, said, in the
debates in the Convention on the proposition to accept the Tariff
Compromise of 1833, that he hated the star-spangled banner; and
unquestionably he expressed the feelings of many of his contemporarie