John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

“ [10] commands” was as despotic a formula as “The king commands” ; and the voter's personal judgment, the very basis and life-giving principle of republics, was obliterated between the dread of proscription and the blighting mildew of the doctrine of supreme State allegiance.

Certain features of the struggle deserve special explanation. The “irrepressible conflict” between North and South, between freedom and slavery, was not confined to the two sides of Mason and Dixon's line; it found a certain expression even in the Cotton States themselves. Most of these States embrace territory of a radically different quality. Their southern and sea-coast front is a broad belt of seaislands, marshes, river-swamps, and low alluvial lands, exceedingly unhealthy from malarial fevers in the hot season, but of unsurpassed fertility, and possessing the picturesque aspects of an exuberant half-tropical vegetation. This is the region of the great cotton, rice, and sugar plantations which have made the South rich and famous; here the St. Clairs and Legrees of real life counted their slaves by hundreds, and aspired to sybaritic lives in ample, hospitable mansions, surrounded by magnificent and venerable live-oak and magnolia groves, avenues of stately palms, princely gardens of native and exotic bloom, and illimitable hedge-lines of the Cherokee rose; a swarm of house-servants to minister to pampered indolence and dispense a lavish hospitality; a troop of field-hands to fill the cotton, rice, or sugar houses; a blending of Arcadian simplicity and feudal pretension; every plantation with its indulgent master, its exacting overseer, its submissive slaves. These were the lights of the picture; abler pens have painted the horrible background of bloody slave-whips, barbarous slave-codes, degrading slave-auctions, yellow fever, cypress-swamps, the bloodhound hunt, and the ever-present dread of servile insurrection. From such