SOUTHERN

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JANUARY, 1855.

ART. I.-REVIEW OF "THE NORTH AND SOUTH," a pamphlet republished from the editorials of the New York Tribune.

THERE is perhaps this analogy between physical and political systems: that the same organization contains at once the germs of development and the seeds of decay. The law of growth and progress is clogged with the conditions of stagnation and decline.

Under this analogy the political fatalist would abandon the care of a system which but partakes of the lot of mortality, nor implicate his own welfare in the tendencies to inevitable destruction. But the patriot, like the Christian, acknowledges no selfish doctrine, the forebodings of a finite judgment do not justify inaction, nor does the certainty of a fatal result exonerate him from the obligations of a positive duty. It is in this sense that we regard our duties to the Federal Union.

Whilst we cannot assert that it will escape the common destiny of human institutions, we are determined to omit no effort to restore its earlier character, and to transmit its blessings to those who come after us. The principles of vitality which animate the Union, are the freedom of civil and religious opinion, the sovereignty of the States, and the physical inducements which it offers to the enterprise of mankind.

The germs of dissolution consist in a tendency to Federal consolidation, or to numerical supremacy and the dissonance of sectional interest, incident to an extended territory and a peculiar social institution. The best method then of restoring the Union to its original theory, consists in restricting the Federal Government to the exercise of its undoubted powers. In vindicating the equality and sovereignty of the States, and in so reconciling interests apparently hostile, as to render them reciprocal if not identical.

But the preservation of the Union in that spirit in which alone it could receive the sanction of freemen, is fraught with many difficulties. It is subject to the powerful hostility of open foes, who would batter down its ramparts with the artillery of argument. It is exposed to the insidious enmity of pretended friends, who pour into the crevices of a dissonant interest the subtile prejudices of race or section. This may explode under the slightest collision and shatter the fabric to atoms.

Besides, political, like physical organisms, are infested by certain parasitical vermin. They spring from larvæ, hatched into mischief by the heat of political corruption, and their mission seems to be the destruction of the body which gave them life.

The friends of the Union in the South have gone to the verge of sectional confidence in allaying the hostility against it. A race of statesmen, Titanic in their efforts, have contended against its continuance. They have subscribed a truce to await the result of further efforts to restore its original action. Compromising nothing, conceding nothing, they have acquiesced in the assurances of their more hopeful fellow-citizens. This truce will be religiously kept their parole will never be violated. For this we will pledge ourselves. But we find that whilst this formidable opposition to the Union has been quieted, a school of Disunion has been secretly and sedulously taught in the Northern States. Its object is sectional aggrandizement for the sake of sectional supremacy. Its means consist in the immigration of foreign

members and the annexation of all the British Provinces of North America. It desires to force the Southern States to a dissolution, that thereby they may be deprived of the political fellowship of the just and patriotic men of the North, that they may be exposed to the enmity of European nations, hostile to their spirit of liberty and jealous of their peculiar productions, and thus, that they may be.virtually subjugated by the free labor and free institutions of a Northern Confederacy. The design to exasperate the South into disunion has happily failed through the predominant patriotism of the American people, who have compelled concessions to the wounded feelings and injured interests of the South. But the conspirators are not defeated. They pursue their plans systematically. They seek to sow in the popular mind of the North a religious difference between the two sections. The canons of this creed are:

Slavery is a sin for which the citizens of the Union are responsible.

They may employ any social or political means to expiate this sin.

It should be eradicated at the consequence of disunion. The inhabitants of the slave-holding States are neither in morals nor usages worthy of association.

It results from these doctrines that there is a moral discrepancy between the North and South, which it is the duty of the North to remove by any means within her power. The moral organization of this sentiment is carried out by religious appeals and sectional defamation. Divines avouch the sanction of holy writ for a crusade against the infidelity of bondage. Professors of fictional literature get up exaggerated pictures of particular evils and blazon them before the world as the invariable results of a particular system. Theorists who have fled from a despotism which they had not the courage to resist, speculate under the freedom of speech guaranteed to them by the slave-holder, upon the iniquities of his institutions. Such is the agency employed in organizing a war against the South. The political organiza

tion is even more formidable. It is headed by statesmen who profess the loftiest patriotism. They assert that their duty to morality exonerates them from the obligations of the oath which they have taken and the constitution which they have subscribed, and that their consideration for the happiness of the human race should outweigh their friendship for fellowcitizens of the same Commonwealth. The design of these statesmen is to acquire a preponderant population and a large majority of States; to unite this power in a common political sentiment. They may then cause an abolition amendment to the Federal Constitution to be adopted by three-fourths of the States, and thus place the South in the dilemma of either violating the constitutional compact into which she has entered, or of surrendering her rights and her property. Following in the wake of these movements and contributing to them both, we find mercenary authors who reduce all the advantages of the Union to a pecuniary equivalent, and value its permanence according to the impartial report of its balance sheet.

We trust that God will bring to naught the machinations of these prophets of Baal who pretend to interpret in his

name.

We remit the political conspirators to a more appropriate arena. There they will find the champions of Union and politics with lance in rest and visor down. We rely upon truth and a sense of public justice to refute the specious calumnies of the last and most unscrupulous class who co-operate in the dissolution of the Union or in the perversion of its principles. To this clan belongs the publication called "The North and the South," and to the refutation of some of its principal fallacies we have devoted this article.

In doing so, we do not aspire to convince the author or his disciples, but to vindicate the South from unjust aspersions before the tribunal of the world.

Those who will read "The North and the South," will find that it would be impossible to pursue in detail the innumerable imputations with which it abounds. But it will be

found to contain certain assertions which are repeatedly restated in different forms and enforced with all the force of figures and all the zeal of declamation. We have therefore condensed the substance of the work into certain propositions, which we will state in order and accompany with an argument.

The scope of argument may be thus stated:

1. Slavery is a social sin, for whose continuance all living under the same confederacy are morally responsible.

2. The South desires the dissolution of the Union.

3. The North is then absolved from any obligation in morals or comity to maintain the Union.

4. The North produces more in value than the South. It is more prosperous and intelligent. It profits but little by its intercourse with the South.

5. Since it neither comports with the morality, comity, nor interests of the North to continue the Union, therefore,

6. The Union ought, in the opinion of the author of the North and the South, to be divided!

The first proposition which we have stated is the postulate upon which the whole argument of abolition rests. It is a question of ethics, upon which the belief of the parties could not be changed by any argument of ours; we shall therefore confine ourselves to a consideration of the political questions involved in the subject under consideration.

The South desires a dissolution of the Union.

This is a gratuitous assertion. As upon this rests the allegation that the North is thereby absolved from any fraternal obligation, we proceed to its refutation. The ground of this assertion is found in an able argument upon the "bject of disunion published during the compromise contest of 1-50. This argument contends that in the event of a separation "The trade of the South would grow like a field of young corn when the long expected showers descend after a withering drought. The South now loses the use of some 130 or 140 millions a year of her capital, and also pays to the federal government at least 26 millions of taxes, 23 of which are