March 27, 1861; The Charleston Mercury
The South is fully aware that the peoples of the Northern States are fundamentally unsound on the question of slavery. They universally regard it as immoral and sinful to hold property in man. They believe it unrighteous and unjustifiable in the Caucasians at the South to hold Africans in bondage. This doctrine has been taught them by their mothers and their school mistresses, their college professors and their preachers, their orators, poets and historians, their lawyers and their jurists. It has been impressed upon them in their primers and their text books, in their religious reading and their light reading, in their histories and their law books. It has come to them through the multifarious channels of the teeming daily press. Generation after generation the work has gone on. Anti-slavery has been taken in with their mothers’ milk, grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength, until so thoroughly assimilated into their constitutions as to become a part of their political principles, their ethics and their religious faith. With singular exceptions the universal sentiment at the North is one of condemnation of Southern civilization and Southern citizens. Whether rudely proclaimed or politely repressed, it pervades their homes, their hustings, their court houses and their sanctuaries, and everywhere its hostile and disparaging influence may be felt by the Southron as the perpetual frown of an alien people against him and against his, touching their domestic institutions and their civil, moral and religious status.
It is true that here and there at the North is found a man who, understanding the true condition and appropriate relations of the Caucasian and African in this country, justifies slavery. But these are few and far between, singular and without influence among their fellows. It is true that many are found who apologize for the South and her semi-barbarous institutions, and find reasons to palliate, and, in great measure excuse, the guilt of her people. Nor is it untrue that many more urge that, however criminal, it is the business of the South, and not the North, who is not our conscience keeper, and has no right to intermeddle.
But with all these admissions, the North is nevertheless radically unsound on the subject of slavery, and the question arises whether, with this great gulf dividing us into two distinct people, having distinct domestic institutions, and broadly differing therein in religion, morals and politics, it would be sensible in the slaveholding States, after ridding themselves of the perilous connection, to admit again under a common government those who are so diverse, so inimical, and whose hostility by that instrumentality has already proved both troublesome and dangerous to the South. Does any one who has looked at the history of the anti-slavery crusade, and noted the method and progress of events, suppose that this adverse sentiment and these deleterious views can be readily eradicated? If so, then he has much to learn of history, and is unskilled in the rule of three, of policy and states. He either does not appreciate the depth and breadth in which the anti-slavery fanaticism is rooted at the North, or he knows little of human nature and the difficulty of correcting its ignorances and errors. For ourselves, we can see no prospect of such a change as would warrant the slaveholding States in again placing themselves under the damaging influences of the Northern States. It is a policy involving little less than the destinies of the South. To us it indicates, on the part of its advocates, a failure to comprehend the requirements of our position, and a disposition to trifle with the securities we now have for safety, independence and prosperity. We trust the public of this section will scrutinise the matter closely, leaving behind them all sentimentality and unreasoning timidity. They will they rise up to the full measure of their great future, and place their heel sternly upon the scheme of reorganizing the Union of irrepressible conflict.”