With Slavery These Southern States Have Grown And
Become Fertile.
The planters have thriven, and the cotton fields
have spread themselves.
And then came emancipation in the British
islands. Under such circumstances and with such a lesson, could it
be expected that the Southern States should learn to love abolition?
It is vain to say that slavery has not caused secession, and that
slavery has not caused the war. That, and that only, has been the
real cause of this conflict, though other small collateral issues
may now be put forward to bear the blame. Those other issues have
arisen from this question of slavery, and are incidental to it and a
part of it. Massachusetts, as we all know, is democratic in its
tendencies, but South Carolina is essentially aristocratic. This
difference has come of slavery. A slave country, which has
progressed far in slavery, must be aristocratic in its nature -
aristocratic and patriarchal. A large slaveowner from Georgia may
call himself a democrat, may think that he reveres republican
institutions, and may talk with American horror of the thrones of
Europe; but he must in his heart be an aristocrat. We, in England,
are apt to speak of republican institutions, and of universal
suffrage, which is perhaps the chief of them, as belonging equally
to all the States. In South Carolina there is not and has not been
any such thing. The electors for the President there are chosen not
by the people, but by the legislature; and the votes for the
legislature are limited by a high property qualification.
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