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greater activity by the unwillingness of France and England to trust their supply to States convulsed by political quarrels;--and then see if, in such circumstances, the price of cotton in the markets of the world will not rule so low, that to raise it by slovenly slave-culture will not be utter loss,--so utter as to drive it wholly from our States, at least while they remain Slave States.
Indeed, the Gulf States are essentially in a feudal condition, an aristocracy resting on slaves,--no middle class.
To sustain government on the costly model of our age necessitates a middle class of trading, manufacturing energy.
The merchant of the nineteenth century spurns to be a subordinate.
The introduction of such a class will create in the Gulf States that very irrepressible conflict which they leave us to avoid,--which, alive now in the Border States, makes these unwilling to secede,--which once created will soon undermine the aristocracy of the Gulf States and bring them back to us free.
Take your distorted Union, your nightmare monster, out of the light and range of these laws of trade and competition; then, without any sacrifice on your part, slavery will go to pieces!
God made it a law of his universe, that villany should always be loss; and if you will only not attempt, with your puny efforts, to stand betwixt the inevitable laws of God's kingdom, as you are doing to-day, and have done for sixty years, by the vigor that the industry of sixteen States has been able to infuse into the sluggish veins of the South, slavery will drop to pieces by the very influence of the competition of the nineteenth century.
That is what we mean by Disunion!
That is my coercion! Northern pulpits cannonading the Southern conscience; Northern competition emptying its pockets; educated slaves awaking its fears; civilization and Christianity beckoning the South into their sisterhood.
Soon every breeze that sweeps over Carolina will bring to
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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