h government. Whatever the
plan adopted, the leading idea was to institute a government that should
be impervious, through one branch, to the future influence of the
non-slaveholding majority.

It is difficult to make entirely clear the ambitious motives and mixed
apprehensions that have combined to precipitate the Southern
slaveholders into rebellion. The defectiveness of the educational system
of the South, and the known responsibility of slaveholders for such
defect and its consequences; the defect in the industrial policy, and
the responsibility of slavery itself for the depressing consequences to
the non-slaveholding population, were fearful charges. A knowledge that
the causes of depression must soon be brought to the examination of
Southern masses, in contrast with a better state of things in the North,
filled the minds of slaveholders with jealous and fearful apprehensions
toward the non-slaveholding population. They knew that its interests
were identified with the Northern educational and industrial policy.
They appreciated fully that through these interests, free labor in the
South had every motive to affinity with the North, educationally,
politically, and industrially. They were astute in the discovery that
under the operation of the Democratic principle, free discussion, and
fair play of reason, the pro-slavery prestige must soon go down in the
South before the greater numerical force of Southern masses. It was,
therefore, not only necessary, as supposed, to overturn the power of the
masses in the South, but also to make them the instruments of their own
overthrow as to political power.

The measurable acquiescence of the non-slaveholding population was
indispensable to the revolutionary project. Without it, there was but
little numerical force. It was, therefore, of entire consequence to make
this population hate the North--to hate the National Government, and to
train it for the purposes of rebellion. The press was suborned wherever
it could be. The pulpit manifested equal alacrity, in order to keep pace
with the workings of the virus of treason. Leading men, assuming to be
statesmen and political economists, taxed their ingenuity in the
invention of falsehood. The effort of the press and politicians was
directed to misrepresenting and disparaging the condition of free labor
in the North; whilst the Southern pulpit was religiously engaged in
establishing the divinity of slavery. It would require a volume