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The “common people” --the non-slaveholders and the small slaveholders — whom the ruling class desired to reduce to vassalage,1 but to whom they now looked for physical aid in the war which their madness might kindle, were blinded, confused, and alarmed.
They were assured that the independence of the South would bring riches and honor to every household.
They were deluded with promises of free trade, that would bring the luxuries of the world to their dwellings.
They were promised the long-desired reopening of the African Slave-trade, which would make slaves so cheap that every man might become an owner of many, and take his position in the
1 Of the 12,000,000 of inhabitants in the Slave-labor States, at the beginning of the war, the ruling class — those in whom resided, in a remarkable degree, the political power of the States-numbered about 1,000,000. Of these, the large land and slave holders, whose influence in the body of the million named was almost supreme, numbered less than 200,000. “In 1850,” says Edward Atkinson, in the Continental Monthly for March, 1862, page 252, “there were in all the Southern States less than 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000.” The production of the great staple, cotton, which was regarded as king of kings in an earthly sense, was in the hands of less than 100,000 men.
The remaining 11,000,000 of inhabitants in the Slave-labor States consisted of 6,000,000 of small slaveholders and non-slaveholders, mechanics, and laboring men; 4,000,000 of negro slaves, and 1,000,000 known in those regions by the common name of “poor white trash,” a degraded population scattered over the whole surface of those States. The foregoing figures are only proximately exact, but may be relied on as a truthful statement of statistics, in round numbers. For several years preceding the rebellion, many of the leading publicists in the Slave-labor States openly advocated a form of government radically opposed to that of our Republic. Their chief vehicle of communication with the small ruling class in those States was De Bow's Review, a magazine of much pretension and ol acknowledged authority. The following brief paragraphs from the pages of that periodical, selected from a thousand of like tenor, will serve to illustrate the truth of the assertion in the text, that the vassalage of the “common people,” in the new empire which long-contemplated revolt was to establish, was intended:-- “The right to govern resides in a very small minority; the duty to obey is inherent in the great mass of mankind.” “There is nothing to which the South [the ruling class] entertains so great a dislike as of universal suffrage. Wherever foreigners settle together in large numbers, there universal suffrage will exist. They understand and admire the leveling democracy of the North, but cannot appreciate the aristocratic feeling of a privileged class, so universal at the South.” “The real civilization of a country is in its aristocracy. The masses are molded into soldiers and artisans by intellect, just as matter and the elements of nature are made into telegraphs and steam-engines. The poor, who labor all day, are too tired at night to study books. If you make them learned, they soon forget all that Is necessary in the common transactions of life. To make an aristocrat in the future, ace must sacrifice a thousand paupers. Yet we would by all means make them — make them permanent, too, by laws of entail and primogeniture. An aristocracy is patriarchal, parental, and representative. The feudal barons of England were, next to the fathers, the most perfect representative government. The king and barons represented everybody, because everybody belonged to them.” And when the war broke out, a writer in the Review said, with truth and candor:--“The real contest of to-day is not simply between the North and South; but to determine whether for ages to come our Government. shall partake more of the form of monarchies or of more liberal forms.”
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