adventurer, the noble exile, the fugitive from justice, the outcast of society, blended together here in the experiment of colonization.

The form is still the same, for form is always more persistent than material in organic life, but the sterling and generous qualities of the primitive stock have greatly changed.

We have seen in these lands Slavery—that relic of barbarism, that leprosy, the foulest that ever preyed upon the vitals of any state—transplanted by that accursed Dutch ship, under the guise of Humanity, flourish, increase, and assume, during this brief period, the proportions of a despotism so powerful, so tenacious, as to defy and resist, almost successfully, the entire strength and resources of the Republic, enriching the slave faction with enormous wealth, but debasing and deteriorating the morals, the blood of the poor and non-slaveholding whites.

This increase of three millions of black men were held in bondage as human cattle by a few thousand white men. To these unfortunate creatures society extended no generosity, no consideration, but what reduced them still lower in the scale of organized beings, and chained them more closely in the sordid and selfish interests of their remorseless masters. To teach the black man to read, even the light of the divine Gospel, was a matter of fine, and imprisonment, and sometimes death.

V.

Seeking to perpetuate this atrocious system, this right of brute force over the helpless black, and establish a despotism with Slavery as its basis, the arrogant faction boldly took up arms against the Republic. “When Fortune,” says the Latin historian, “is determined upon the ruin of a people, she can so blind them as to render them insensible to danger, even of the greatest magnitude.”

Their appeals to arms were in the name of justice and glory, but they were without the echo of liberty and humanity. They summoned the masses of poor whites, whom they had degraded below the level of the slave, to rise and fight for their liberties, which were as empty as the winds of the desert. There were no liberties, no privileges for the poor whites, but to curse poverty and question God’s providence.

The individual desires of the few had usurped and swallowed up the rights of society. There was no society but the relation between the black man and his master. The law, order, and force were all within the control of the rich slaveholder.

The masses were either their tools, or too abject to be considered as dangerous; too ignorant to be feared as seditious, too poor to be regarded as anything more than trash, below the level and the value of the negro. This condition of the poor whites was the result of physical, political, and moral causes, long and silently at work.

VI.

The pretence for strife was resistance to oppression, and the extension and perfection of liberty to the masses; yet they impelled the people to passion, without mingling a single truth with the illusions with which they decorated their standards. Whilst they talked of the independent spirit of the new government, and the glory of resisting the oppressive policy of the invaders, every act and edict gathered closer and stronger the bonds which degraded and burdened the poor white.

The owner of seven slaves was exempt from the hazard of battle, but poverty and starvation of family were no causes of exemption for the non-slaveholder.

The real design, concealed by the strife, was the foundation of an empire of gigantic and seductive form, radiant and glittering with the splendid architecture of aristocratic sovereignty, but without reason or conscience.

The resolve was to control the production of the principal staples of industry and trade, and subject the commercial world to their caprices.

Thus they preferred the intoxications of conquest, the gratifications of lust, to the triumphs of true civilization, to the congratulations of a redeemed race. They cared not for reputation among the nations of the earth, nor immortality, nor renown; and they neglected or despised those happy stars which, now and then, conduct men and races to glory. “Glory belongs to the God in heaven; upon the earth it is the lot of virtue, and not of genius—of that virtue which is useful, grand, beneficent, brilliant, heroic.”

VII.

Revolutions almost always spring from the noble and generous enthusiasm of youth; but seditions arise from the vulgar and ignoble crowd, or from the outcast few, who would, for wealth, sacrifice all that honor and nature hold dear; or for the meaner gratifications of self-aggrandizement, would crumble into dust, and scatter to the winds of the earth, the noblest institutions and laws of mankind. Who will say that this resort to arms was an insurrection of justice in favor of the weak, or that it was a revolt of nature against tyranny?

The agitations of revolutions stir up the innermost natures of men, and from the revelations out of the depths appear the extreme qualities of the soul, elevated or debased, according to the inspirations from Heaven or the influence of a vile cause.

What rays of intellectual light, what flashes of genuine eloquence, burst forth during the tempestuous times of this period to illumine their progress or define the glory of their future? When the minds and imaginations of men are moved in civil war, they betray, in spite of themselves, the nobility or meanness of their cause. Even the ignorant, says Quintilian, when moved by the violent passions, do not seek for what they are to say. It is the soul alone that renders them eloquent. Only the hoarse clamors for revenge, or the hollow laugh against the remonstrance of humanity, do we hear from their tribunals and halls of legislation. Fatuity possessed their minds, and rather than not succeed in their designs, the leaders would have preferred a dreary solitude to the best interests of humanity, or, like Erostratus, they would have rather burned down the temple of liberty itself.

“Pejus deteriusque tyrannide sive injusto imperio, bellum civile.”

VIII.

Civil liberty is again triumphant, but at what a sacrifice of human life! What a deluge of blood has been poured over nature’s fields, where the contending armies have struggled together! A half a million of lives have been yielded up in this the nation’s sacrifice.

“The tree of Liberty,” said Barere, “is best watered with the blood of tyrants;” but how few among this immense host of victims were the originators of the sedition! The merciless schemers of bloody and cruel wars rarely expose their precious lives to the chances of combat.

During the existence of the slave system, and the long period of its progress, what has it produced to enrich the heritage of the human mind? Where are the holy and pure traditions, the bright recollections?

Neither wisdom nor philosophy has appeared, nor those arts which serve to form the “happy genius of nations.” There are countries where the march of ideas is accelerated only by the force of selfish passions; and philanthropy, that true index of civilization, only appears when it is required by mercantilism or political ambition. The aims and influences of commercial and political life can debase and destroy the noblest impulses. “It is a grand and beautiful spectacle,” exclaims the eloquent Rousseau, “to see man issue forth out of nothingness, as it were, by his own proper efforts, to dissipate, by the light of his reason, the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, to elevate himself even above himself, to glance with his spirit even into the celestial regions, to