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| Separations: Each to their own place |
(An article in the New York Herald, February 3, 1861 entitled The Reaction Against Abolitionists -- American Civilization Versus Puritan Fanaticism found at the Daily Chronicles of the American Civil War: excerpts below....) Here is one side of the argument -- and especially as the country slided towards Civil War, the pressure mounted on the Abolitionists to stop...they were seen as causing all the problems.
"The fearful consequences of the abolition propagandism in breaking up the Union and inaugurating civil war are coming home to every man's business, if not to his bosom. Hence the effort to suppress it. The Northern mind needs to be re-educated.
...As to the North being the brain of the confederacy, the assertion is contrary to the notorious truth of history. A Southern man -- Jefferson, a slaveholder -- drew up the Declaration of Independence; A Southern man -- Madison, a slaveholder -- was the great artificer of the constitution; a Southern man -- Washington, a slaveholder -- presided over the federal convention which adopted it; was first President of the United States, as he was the victorious military chief of the Revolution. Up to the present time the slave holding South has furnished the greater number of our Presidents and our principal statesmen, and it is only now, when narrow minded Puritanism attempts to grasp the helm, that there is danger of shipwreck. It was not the witch burning, persecuting sectarianism of Massachusetts that modelled the constitution, but the liberal ideas of Virginia -- the mother of States and of Presidents.
Massachusetts was the only State of the whole thirteen that was not a slave State at the time of the Union. She never discovered that slavery was a sin till it had ceased to be profitable in her cold, barren climate. For years afterwards her ships conveyed slaves from Africa to Virginia and other Southern States. And long before that she made slaves of the Indians and sold them into captivity. The Puritan clergy have discovered that negro slavery is a sin. The Southern States, on the contrary, find negro slavery profitable for their climate, and their clergy pronounce it not only no sin, but a beneficent institution, sanctioned by the Bible itself. ...Even as it is -- New England grows rich from the manufacture of cotton, and all of them wear the fabric which comes from slave culture, while none are so conscientious as to deny themselves the use of sugar, or rice, or tobacco, the products of the same kind of slave labor.
Now the Puritans hold that the Negroes ought to be made free throughout the whole land -- which of course implies their equality with the whites, their right to amalgamate with them, and their right to fill the public offices, from that of President downwards. The republicans hold that there ought to be only one kind of labor at the South and at the North. But the laws of nature overrule their contracted views. Nations have been formed by race and climate. The United States has a vast area that embraces two opposite climates -- one cold, suited only for white labor, and the other tropical, suited only for negro labor. For the first time in the history of the race it has thus become happy, contented, civilized and Christianized. In the North the negro dies out.
It is only by servitude under Christian masters that the negro has ever been rescued from barbarism, or can be preserved from relapsing into it. It is only by this system that he can be compelled to work in the South...It is only by servitude of the negro that the two races can be kept distinct in one community; otherwise we should soon witness here the deterioration of men which has ruined Mexico. Servitude is happiness to the Negro; liberty is a means of happiness to the Anglo Saxon...the double system of civilization in one country is a new governmental idea peculiar to the United States of American. It has worked well, and would have worked well forever if let alone. "
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