rica in every one of its
aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its
revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of
character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has
destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and
enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a
ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white
population--the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them--are
ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven
literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed
religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse
be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the
minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest
attributes--confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions
between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given
over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had
created under the very ribs of the republic.

We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against
the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and
which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense.
Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black
horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent
as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North,
they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary
tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can
calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery,
and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all
its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the
freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal
malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and
justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the
saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their
agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres--regarding them
as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly
sacrifices--these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so
powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have
marshalled themselves into aven