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- The Southern Commercial Convention
-- secret history of the anti-tribune debate
-- Parson Brownlow's great joke
-- Greeley and the counter-jumpers
-- Sartorial description of the author
-- a sublime moral
-- the Tennessee editor
-- Parson Brownlow's pulpit pistols
-- a Southern opinion of Greeley
-- the Tribune's correspondent an honorary delegate
-- sound and fury
-- turned out
-- the dagger parasol stem
-- Planting Potatoes for Posterity,
The Commercial Convention.
everybody, North and South, has heard of the great Commercial Conventions, which regularly assemble, now here, now there, but always in the
Slave States, to discuss the interests, and “resolve” on the prosperity — immediate, unparalleled, and unconditional — of slaveholding trade, territory, education, Legree-lash-literature, and “direct commerce with
Europe!”
These assemblies are generally regarded, in the
Slave States, as the safety-valves of the
Southern Juggernaut-institution, without which, for want of ventilation, that political organization would speedily explode, and scatter death and destruction to the ends of the earth.
All the politicians of the third order, and the second class (occasionally, perhaps, of the upper circles, also) assiduously attend them, to publicly renew the unmanly assurances of their unwavering loyalty to the overshadowing disgrace of the
American nation, and the blighting and devastating curse of their own unhappy section.
These exhibitions would be more amusing than a farce, if they were not, to thoughtful men, more tragic than a tragedy.
For what is more sorrowful than to see men of talent the willing and enthusiastic eulogists of so very foul a crime as the system of American slavery?
