1861. |
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afterward the whole State was excited by preparations for the election of delegates to the Convention, ninety-nine in number.
The 20th day of December was the time appointed for the election, and the 7th of January
was the day selected for the Convention to assemble.
Public meetings were held in all parts of the State, at which the most distinguished men in the Commonwealth were speakers.1
There was a diversity of sentiment among the politicians in Mississippi, mainly on the question whether there should be immediate, separate, and independent State action, or whether they should wait for the co-operation of other States.
Two parties were formed, one called the “Secessionists” proper, the other “Co-operationists.”
Each was zealous in a bad cause, for all had determined on secession in some form.
“These are but household quarrels,” said one of the “Co-operationists ;” “as against Northern combination and aggression, we are united.
We are all for resistance.
We differ as to the mode; but the fell spirit of Abolitionism has no deadlier, and, we believe, no more practical foes than the ‘Co-operationists’ of the South.
We are willing to give the North a chance to say whether it will accept or ”
1 There were also speakers who were not distinguished beyond their own immediate neighborhoods. These were more numerous and influential than the others. Their persons, manner, and language commended them to the great mass of the people who attended these gatherings. Their harangues were forcible and inflammatory. One of these is here given as a specimen of a fair average of the speeches made to the people all over the Slave-labor States at this time, at their primary gatherings. It is quoted from The Iron Furnace; or, Slavery and Secession: by the Rev. Join H. Aughey, a Presbyterian clergyman of Mississippi:--
“Ladies and gentlemen:--I am a secessionist out and out; voted for Jeff. Davis for Governor in 1850; when the same issue was before the people.” After announcing, in vile language, the election of Mr. Lincoln, he said:--“ Shall he be permitted to take his seat on Southern soil? No, never! I will volunteer as one of thirty thousand to butcher the villain if he ever sets foot on slave territory. Secession or submission! What patriot would hesitate for a moment which to choose? No true son of Mississippi would brook the idea of submission to the rule of the baboon, Abe Lincoln--a fifth-rate lawyer, a broken down hack of a politician, a fanatic, an abolitionist. I, for one, would prefer an hour of virtuous liberty to a whole eternity of bondage under Northern, Yankee, wooden nutmeg rule. The halter is the only argument that should be used against the submissionists [that is to say, loyal men in the State], and I predict that it will soon, very soon, be in force. We have glorious news from Tallahatchie. Seven Tory submissionists [Union men] were hanged there in one day, and the so-called Union candidates, having the wholesome dread of hemp before their eyes, are not canvassing the county; therefore the heretical dogma of submission, under any circumstances, disgraces not. their county. Compromise! Let us have no such word in our vocabulary. . . . No concession of the scared Yankees will now prevent secession. We are now threatened with internecine war. The Yankees are an inferior race; they are cowardly in the extreme. They are descended from the Puritan stock, who never bore rule in any nation. We, the descendants of the Cavaliers, are the Patricians; they the Plebeians. The Cavaliers have always been the rulers, the Puritans the ruled.” Then mounting the Delphio stool on which the elder Rhett (see page 96) had prophesied, this disciple attempted to imitate his master. “The dastardly Yankees,” he said, “ will never fight us; but if they, In their presumption and audacity, venture to attack us, let the war come — I repeat it, let it come! The conflagration of their burning cities, the desolation of their country, and the slaughter of their inhabitants, will strike the nations of the earth dumb with astonishment, and serve as a warning to future ages, that the Slaveholding Cavaliers of the sunny South are terrible in their vengeance. . . . We will drive back to their inhospitable clime every Yankee who dares to pollute our shores with his cloven foot. Go he must, and, if necessary, with the blood-hounds en his track. The scum of Europe and the mudsills of Yankeedom shall never be permitted to advance a step south of 36° 30‘, the old Missouri Compromise line. South of that latitude is ours-westward to the Pacific. With my heart of hearts I hate a Yankee; and I will make my children swear eternal hatred to the whole Yankee race. In battle, one Southron is equivalent to ten Northern hirelings; but I regard it a waste of time to speak of Yankees — they deserve not our attention. . . . We have a genial clime, and a soil of uncommon fertility. We have free institutions — freedom for the white man, bondage for the black man, as Nature and Nature's God designed. We have fair women and brave men. The lines have truly fallen to us in pleasant places. We have indeed a goodly heritage. The only evil we complain of is our bondage to the Yankees, through the Federal Union. Let us burst these shackles from our limbs, and we will be free indeed.” Four years later, the State of Mississippi was marked in every direction by the dark lines of War's desolating paths, and in almost every district were heard the anathemas of a deceived, betrayed, and suffering people, against those Oligarchs whose folly and wickedness had laid the Commonwealth and its thousands of happy homes in ruina.
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