Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[77] represented as a gathering of Germans and Irishmen. In point of fact, the Anglo-Saxon race ruled equally in the South and in the North. It rapidly absorbed the races that had preceded it, as well as those which supplied it with a contingent of emigrants. In taking part in its work, those races also adopted its customs and its character.

In the first city of the South, New Orleans, there did indeed exist a nucleus of population which by its language and associations clung to the country that had basely sold it. But that islet, already half submerged under the rising tide of another race, did not constitute a nationality. As to the Irish emigrant, far from resisting this tide, he rather followed it; for although differing widely from the Anglo-Saxon, he goes in search of a new country only where the latter is already firmly established. He resembles those plants, difficult of acclimation, which only thrive upon a soil already prepared by other and more vigorous vegetation. By another contradiction to his primitive habits, becoming in America a denizen of cities rather than a tiller of the soil, the barriers which slavery had raised against the settling of husbandmen did not exist for him. Consequently, the Irish element had spread equally over the South and over the North. With that pliability of mind peculiar to the race, Irishmen adopted all the prejudices of those among whom they lived; and when the war broke out, they were seen to enlist in the cities of the South, where they were very numerous, with as much eagerness as their brethren living in the North displayed in defence of the Federal flag.

No commercial interest separated the South from the aggregate interests of the Northern States. Large rivers formed a single basin of all the centre of the continent, and all its products converged into the main artery of the Mississippi, of which the Southern States held the lower course. Exclusively occupied with the culture of cotton and sugar-cane, they asked from the Western States meat and flour, which they could not produce in sufficient quantities for their own consumption. The North supplied them with the necessary capital for all their industrial enterprises. It is true that the South sought in these very circumstances a pretext for a new grief, by pretending to be the victim of speculation