hers established it, and as alone it has any value, is not a
thing of mere legalities,--it must be a true union of hearts and hands,
a spirit of mutual confidence and respect among the various communities
of one people. But for many years our most characteristic Southern
institution has been widely and loudly denounced among you as wicked and
inhuman. It has been proclaimed as 'the sum of all villainies.' We have
been held up to the reprobation of the world as tyrants and
man-stealers. Those at the North who disapproved of such abuse have
failed to silence or repress it. This denunciation has spread until
apparently it has won the preponderating sentiment of the North. A
national household in which we are thus branded as sinners and criminals
is no longer a home for us.

"This hostility has borne its natural fruit in open attack. A peaceful
Virginia village has been assailed by armed men, its citizens shot down
while defending their homes, and the summons given for servile
insurrection with all its horrors. The leader in this crime, justly
condemned and executed under Virginia's laws, has been widely honored
throughout the North as a hero and martyr. By the light of that applause
we must interpret the real feeling of the North, and its probable future
course toward us.

"The Presidential election has now been won by a party whose avowed
principle is the restriction of slavery, while its animating spirit is
active hostility to slavery. We cannot trust the Republican party in its
profession of respect for the Constitution. Even in its formal
declaration it ignores a Supreme Court decision, and advances a
revolutionary doctrine as to slavery in the territories. Its elected
candidate has declared that 'this government cannot endure permanently
half slave and half free.' The party's only reason for being is
opposition to slavery, and there is every probability that this
opposition will, with growing power and opportunity, be directed against
the system as it now exists in our Southern States.

"The spirit of the American Union is dissolved already, when its chief
magistrate has been elected by the votes of one section and by a party
animated solely by hostility to the industrial and social system of the
other section. The formal bond of the Union can hereafter be only an
instrument to harass and destroy our liberties. We therefore propose
that that bond be at once and finally cancelled. It is and has been from
the beginni