Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

Assuredly the New England demon, who has been persecuting the South till its intolerable cruelty and insolence forced her, in a spasm of agony, to rend her chains asunder. The New Englander must have something to persecute, and as he has hunted down all his Indians, burnt all his witches, and persecuted all his opponents to the death, he invented abolitionism as the sole resource left to him for the gratification of his favorite passion. Next to this motive principle is his desire to make money dishonestly, trickily, meanly, and shabbily. He has acted on it in all his relations with the South, and has cheated and plundered her in all his dealings by villanous tariffs. If one objects that the South must have been a party to this, because her boast is that her statesmen have ruled the Government of the country, you are told that the South yielded out of pure good-nature. Now, however, she will have free trade, and will open the coasting trade to foreign nations, and shut out from it the hated Yankees, who so long monopolized and made their fortunes by it. Under all the varied burdens and miseries to which she was subjected, the South held fact to her sheet anchor. South Carolina was the mooring ground in which it found the surest hold. The doctrine of State rights was her salvation, and the fiercer the storm raged against her — the more stoutly damagogy, immigrant preponderance, and the blasts of universal suffrage bore down on her, threatening to sweep away the vested interests of the South in her right to govern the States--the greater was her confidence, and the more resolutely she held on her cable. The North attracted “hordes of ignorant Germans and Irish,” and the scum of Europe, while the South repelled them. The industry, the capital of the North increased with enormous rapidity, under the influence of cheap labor and manufacturing ingenuity and enterprise, in the villages which swelled into towns, and the towns which became cities under the unenvious eye of the South. She, on the contrary, toiled on slowly, clearing forests and draining swamps to find new cotton grounds and rice-fields, for the employment of her own industry and for the development of her only capital--“involuntory labor.” The tide of immigration waxed stronger, and by degrees she saw the districts into which she claimed the right to introduce this capital closed against her, and occupied by free labor. The doctrine of “squatter sovereignty,” and the force of hostile tariffs, which placed a heavy duty on the very articles which the South most required, completed the measure of injuries to which she was subjected, and the spirit of discontent found vent in fiery debate, in personal insults, and in acrimonious speaking and writing, which increased in intensity in proportion as the abolition movement, and the contest between the federal principle and State rights, became more vehement. I am desirous of showing in a few words, for the information of English readers, how it is that the confederacy which Europe knew simply as a political entity has succeeded in dividing itself. The slave States held the doctrine, or say they did, that each State was independent as France or as England, but that for certain purposes they chose a common agent to deal with foreign nations, and to impose taxes for the purpose of paying the expenses of the agency. We, it appears, talked of American citizens when there were no such beings at all. There were, indeed, citizens of the sovereign State of South Carolina, or of Georgia or Florida, who permitted themselves to pass under that designation, but it was merely a matter of personal convenience. It will be difficult for Europeans to understand this doctrine, as nothing like it has been heard before, and no such confederation of sovereign States has ever existed in any country in the world. The northern men deny that it existed here, and claim for the Federal Government powers not compatible with such assumptions. They have lived for the Union, they served it, they labored for and made money by it. A man as a New York man was nothing — as an American citizen he was a great deal. A South Carolinian objected to lose his identity in any description which included him and a “Yankee clock-maker” in the same category. The Union was against him; he remembered that he came from a race of English gentlemen who had been persecuted by the representatives — for he will not call them the ancestors — of the Puritans of New England, and he thought that they were animated by the same hostility to himself. He was proud of old names, and ho felt pleasure in tracing his connection with old families in the old country. His plantations were held by old charters, or had been in the hands of his fathers for several generations; and he delighted to remember that, when the Stuarts were banished from their throne and their country, the burgesses of South Carolina had solemnly elected the wandering Charles king of their state, and had offered him an asylum and a kingdom. The philosophical historian may exercise his ingenuity in conjecturing what would have been the result if the fugitive had carried his fortunes to Charleston.

South Carolina contains 34,000 square miles and a population of 720,000 inhabitants, of whom 385,000 are black slaves. In the old rebellion it was distracted between revolutionary principles and the loyalist predilections, and at least one-half of the planters were faithful to George III., nor did they yield till Washington sent an army to support their antagonists and drove them from the colony.

In my next letter I shall give a brief account of a visit to some of the planters, as far as it can be made consistent with the obligations which the rites of hospitality impose on the guest as well as upon the host. These gentlemen are well-bred, courteous, and hospitable. A genuine aristocracy, they have time to cultivate their minds, to apply themselves to politics