The Continental Monthly, page 189 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download190
nfluences South have cajoled and terrorized the bulk of the Southern population into apparent acquiescence in treason. It yet remains to be seen what disposition will be disclosed by the Southern people, as soon as protection is guaranteed to them against the tyranny and usurpations of the rebel influence. It is prophesied that there will be found a heart in the bulk of the Southern population; that it will still cling with affection and pride to that government which was their guarantee, and which no power now on earth is competent to shake. It is not against the deluded, the timid, or the helpless of the South that we would make the indictment for political crime. It is the perfidious pro-slavery spirit in politics that we seek to arraign.
The analysis of developed motives in which the slaveholders' rebellion had its origin, must naturally excite the inquiry in the American mind, as to how far the slaveholding element can be trusted. As a political force, we find it sowing the seeds of political discontent. As an anti-democratic element, we find it plotting the overthrow of democratic government. In its efforts to denationalize republican government in America, it has not scrupled to seek aid from, and alliance with, the haters of republican institutions every where. Under such calamitous teachings as it has inflicted, can we longer conclude that it can, from its aptitudes and nature, be converted into an element of national strength? There is a South, and a great South, and would continue to be, were there not a negro or slaveholder sojourning there. The seven millions non-slaveholding population in the Southern States have rights, social and political, based on the motive to maintain republican government. The Constitution of the Union, as the highest principle of fundamental law, guarantees in express terms, to every State, the form of a republican government; and not less by implication, the essential qualities of an actual one. It matters not how much the non-slaveholding population of the South ma