Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[75] of whatever nature, it is possible for the slaveocrats to bring against us. Of this they may take due notice, and govern themselves accordingly.

... It is our honest conviction that all the pro-slavery slaveholders deserve to be at once reduced to a parallel with the basest criminals that lie fettered within the cells of our public prisons. .... Compensation to slave-owners for negroes! Preposterous idea — the suggestion is criminal, the demand unjust, wicked, monstrous, damnable. Shall we pat the blood-hounds for the sake of doing them a favour? Shall we feed the curs of slavery to make them rich at our expense? Pay these whelps for the privilege of converting them into decent, honest, upright men?

Such was the language, endorsed by sixty-eight Northern Congressmen, applied to the South: to that part of the Union indeed which was the superiour of the North in every true and refined element of civilization; which had contributed more than its share to all that had given lustre to the military history of America, or the councils of its senate; which, in fact, had produced that list of illustrious American names best known in Europe: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Marshall, Clay, Calhoun, Scott, and Manry.

The fact was that insult to the South had come to be habitual through every expression of Northern opinion; not only in political tirades, but through its lessons of popular education, the ministrations of its church, its literature, and every form of daily conversation. The rising generation of the North were taught to regard the Southerner as one of a lower order of civilization; a culprit to reform, or a sinner to punish. A large party in the North affected the insolent impertinence of regarding the Union as a concession on the part of the North, and of taunting the South with the disgrace which her association in the Union inflicted upon the superiour and more virtuous people of the Northern States. There were no bounds to this conceit. It was said that the South was an inferiour part of the country; that she was a “plague-spot;” that the national fame abroad was compromised by the association of the South in the Union; and that a New England traveller in Europe blushed to confess himself an American, because nearly half of the nation of that name were slaveholders. Not a few of the Abolitionists made a pretence of praying that the Union might be dissolved, that they might be cleared, by the separation of North and South, of any implication in the crime of slavery. Even that portion of the party calling themselves Republicans, affected that the Union stood in the way of the North. Mr. Banks, speaker of the House in the Thirty-first Congress, was the author of the coarse jeer--“Let the Union slide ;” and the New York Tribune had complained that the South “could not be kicked out of the Union.” --We shall see in the light of subsequent events how this Northern affectation for disunion was a lie, a snare to the South, and a hypocrisy unparalleled in all the records of partisan animosity.