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[25] secession must quarrel with the North, where it was first asserted as a right of the States, and not with the Southern States that have surrendered it.

The South is willing to trust the North on this question. Our incomparable physical geography, giving us the world-wide monopoly of the cotton growth, our soil that is capable of sustaining a larger proportionate population than China or India, our inviting climate, our exhaustless minerals, furnish us with every resource of national wealth and power.

We shall not be impoverished if any of the States shall find an association with us in the Federal Union incompatible with their interests or their moral sensibilities and should prefer to go in peace. We shall not wish to withdraw. The sceptre of wealth and power is again within our grasp.

The enfranchisement of the negro has added so materially to our political power that we have ceased to fear that we shall be buffeted about at the will of a despotic majority-power in the country.

Faithful to the Conststution, we will see that it is obeyed in letter and spirit in the South, and so'we will consolidate our power, and its impregnable citadel of strength will be in the hearts of our people of all races and conditions.

Those who fear that we will oppress the free negroes, do not understand either our feelings or our interests. Our interest in slavery was never so great as our interest in our slaves. And now that they are free, our concern for their personal welfare is naturally greater than it is for their political promotion. We desire to benefit them practically. We did not enslave them. If their enslavement was a sin, it is not at our door. They were brought to us as slaves, and from a slave country; and chiefly, by Northern slave-dealers.

Few Southern eyes ever witnessed the horrors of the middle passage, and fewer Southern ships ever sailed in the slave-trade.

We have not added a shadow to the darkness of their native barbarism. On the contrary, we have used the code under which they were born; the system of laws adopted instinctively by their rulers, as all systems of unrevealed law have been adopted by all races of men; and we have added to it, in their government, the revealed law which contains statutes adapted to such people. We have thus educated and enlightened them until they compare favorably in actual knowledge with many civilized and christianized peoples; until our own brethren have thought them worthy to be set in authority over the people who have been their only teachers.

We believe that as a body of people they are deficient in the faculties which comprise the power to govern with wisdom and safety, in that highest form of civilized government, the constitutional republic of the

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