John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[11] surroundings came the morbid dreams of an unholy league between perpetual bondage and free trade, which should rear a gigantic slave empire, before which the intellect, the power, the splendor, and the government of all preceding ages and nations should fade and wane.

The northern half of the Cotton States was very different; here were thin, sandy uplands of meagre productiveness; monotonous forests of pine and scrub-oak, running again into the more varied and romantic scenery of the subsiding spurs of the Alleghanies; blue crags, bright streams, shining waterfalls, and the changing, deciduous foliage of the North. Great slave-plantations could not flourish here; white population predominated; agriculture was varied; the husbandman had a sterner struggle with nature; and communities were burdened with all the economic and social detriments of the slave system, having none of its delights.

A dense slave population and ultra secessionism were, therefore, the rule in the southern, and white majorities and union feeling in the northern districts of the Cotton States. Therefore, also, political power lay in the slave region, which again was allied to the commercial interests clustering about southern seaports. All the leverage was in the hands of treason-offices, ostracism, advantage in representation, commercial ambition, party ascendancy. The wonder is, not that secession succeeded in the struggle, but that there was any serious contest at all. With all this, there is strong ground for belief that insurrection gained its ends at last only through chicane, deceit, and fraud. Not a single Cotton State but Texas dared to submit its Ordinance of Secession to a direct vote of the people.

The struggle assumed its most determined phase in Georgia. She was the Empire State of the South, and, therefore, indispensable to the conspiracy, in which distinguished citizens