"Southern fire enters"
The Yankee press is anxious to impress upon the public the idea that the present rupture and its accompanying horrors are all the work of a little knot of Southern extremists and fire-eaters and that up to the period of their incendiary agitation, the
Union had been a harmonious and blissful wedlock of willing and devoted hearts, a charming honeymoon, crowned with ardent love and tender endearments, and never darkened by a cloud of suspicion nor a whisper of discord.
If any man will take up an old volume of the Richmond
Enquirer at the beginning of the present century, and, we presume, any other paper of that date and look over its pages, he will see just how much truth there is in this stereotyped Yankee table.
We refer particularly to the
Enquirer, because we happen to have in our possession one of those ancient and race records of the past, which, old and discolored as it is, throws a flood of light upon this subject.
The columns of the
Enquirer of that date are filed with editorial comments and communications in reply to attacks upon the
South by Yankee journals, some of which are transferred to the
Enquirer, and one as bitter and abusive as any that preceded the present war. These Northern assaults on the
South are not only as unfriendly and virulent as others of a later date, but seem to have been dictated by the same jealousy and envy of the superior comforts and character of the
Southern people.
Thus we find repeated sneers at the boasted chivalry and courage of the
Southern gentlemen who, it is said, look down with contempt upon the laboring men of the
North and imagine that nature and education have fitted them to become masters of a race of man as well born as themselves, and more hardy and industrious.
It is evident from these sectional ebullitions upon both sides, which we find in this old volume, that the North and South never loved each other from the start, and indeed, if they had, those solemn warnings of
Washington's
Farewell Address against the dangers of sectional animosity would have been entirely unnecessary.
In truth, a large minority of the
American people, especially in the
South, was opposed to the formation of the
Union, and the sovereign conventions which handed them over, haltered and fettered, to the hymenial altar, did not succeed in transforming their souls.
"Whom, with their bodies, God' hath joined together, let not man put asunder;" but whom God hath not joined, whose bands He has in truth for bidden by dissimilarity of character, education tastes, sympathies, interests, institutions, man can not keep together if he will.
From the very beginning the North and South were two people; having nothing more in common between each other than
Prussia and
England, except that they spoke the same language, and even this single bond of unity was more than neutralized by the diversity of their domestic institutions
New England was settled by the Puritans, and although
Dutch.
Swedes,
English, and other nations contributed to the colonization of other portions of the
North, yet the Yuritan element in both polities and religion has obtained the ascendancy, and is in fact the controlling influence of the present war. It is
Puritan ideas and fanaticism which have lighted this firebrand, and which have moulded to its own purposes the conservative public opinion of the middle States like clay in the hands of the potter.
On the other hand, the Cavalier element in the
South, although not the only one, has ever been as predominant in the
South as the
Puritan in the
North.
Generally the Roundhead fled from the Cavalier party in
England, when it was in power, to the
North, and the Cavalier from Roundhead ascendancy, to the
South.
The original causes of the quarrel may have passed away from the minds of most of their descendents; but the dissimilarity between the moral constitutions, habits of thought, breeding and manners of the Cavalier and Roundhead must necessarily run in the blood for generations, and defy all the glue and cement of political unions.
Even under the light yoke of the old Confederacy, and the pressure of common dangers in the revolutionary war, they pulled together like unfriendly oxen.
There were even then exhibitions of mutual jealousy and contempt, which the presence of a common enemy only suppressed for the time, but never entirely eradicated.
Such were the incongruous and discordant elements out of which the framers of the
American Constitution undertook to create a homogeneous people.
Such the oil and water which they put into a Federal bottle and expected it to mingle.
But if the original components of the American Union had been ever so harmonious, if the Cavalier and
Puritan, the North and South the slave holder and non slaveholder, had been as loving as two turtle doves from the moment they were born the partial and unjust legislation of the
Federal Government furnished ample reason for sections, alienation, ripening into ultimate disruption, without compelling us to look for the cause in that which was only the effect, the so called agitations of Southern fire-eaters.
We need not refer in detail to the long train of measures by which the
South has been made to bear the great proportion of the expenses of the
Government, and by which all the capital, commerce, and manufactures of the
United States were concentrated in Northern hands.
Even their miserable fisheries we were obliged to support, and, stripped of all facilities for commerce and manufactures of our own, expended enormous sums in supplying our wants in every department of life with the productions of Northern industry.
The course of trade once fixed in the channels which the policy of the
Federal Government had carved out, it was impossible to alter it and the
South, whose value to the
Union is shown by the enormous sums they are expending to get it back; the
South, which was the source of wealth to the
Government and the
North, was left itself to the bare means of subsistence, and then reproached by those who had swindled it out of its income for its poverty and barbarism.
And now they would have us believe that the present rupture is all the work of
Jeff. Davis, and a few other Southern fire enters.
We have not adverted to another and the most prominent cause of the rupture attributed by the
Yankees to a few Southern extremists; we mean Abolition.
Did
Jeff Davis and the other fire- eaters manufacture that firebrand?
It seems to us that every can did and philosophical mind must discover in the union of slaveholding and non slaveholding States, in any age so tainted with fanaticism as the present, the germ of its own dissolution.
From the time of
Wilberforce,
England, the greatest power of the earth, and which exercises more influence than any other upon public opinion in
America, has engaged in an anti-slavery crusade as fierce and persistent as that under Peter the Hermit.
The abolition of slavery in her own colonies was intended to operate directly upon slavery in the
Southern States of
America.
Her object was the division of the
Union; whether to make herself independent of a country strong enough to be her rival for cotton, or to make herself independent of both sections, and render the cotton of
India a substitute in the markets of the world for that of the
Southern States, we do not pretend to decide.
Certain it is that for the last thirty years British statesmen and
British fausotics have worked hand in hand for the overthrow of Southern institutions, and have brought the anti-slavery sentiment of that country to bear in every shape and form upon the
Northern States, which, being themselves non slaveholding and already developing in same sections a strong abolition tendency, in addition to their old jealousy of the
South, presented an inviting field for British machinations.
The result, a persistent and increasing war upon Southern property and peace, culminating in the election of
Lincoln, is before the world.
The man who cannot see in the causes we have thus briefly referred to the original seeds of a disruption inevitable, and never at any period a question of anything but time, must be willfully blind or hopelessly imbecile.
The man who, in view of the original repugnance of Cavalier and
Puritan, the clashing interests, the unjust legislation of the
Federal Government, the anti-slavery sentiment of the whole world predicating the
North upon the
South, can ascribe disunion to
Jeff. Davis and a knot of Southern fire-eaters and conspirators, might attribute the rush of a steamer to the sparks that fly from its furnace, or the teasing of the ocean in a storm to the foam that crowns its waves.
