The Pretext for Disunion

THERE is direct evidence to prove that the politicians of South Carolina and elsewhere had been making preparations for revolt many years, and that the alleged violations of the Fugitive-Slave Act and the election of Mr. Lincoln were made only pretexts for stirring up the "common people" to support and do the fighting for them. The testimony of speakers in the Convention at Charleston that declared the secession of that State from the Union, was clear and explicit. "It is not an event of a day," said Robert Barnwell Rhett, one of the most violent declaimers of his class; "it is not anything produced by Mr. Lincoln's election, or by the non-execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law. It is a matter which has been gathering head for thirty years. In regard to the Fugitive-Slave Law, I myself doubted its constitutionality, and doubted it on the floor of the Senate when I was a member of that body. The States, acting in their sovereign capacity, should be responsible for the rendition of slaves. This was our best security." Another member of the Convention (Francis S. Parker) said: "It is no spasmodic effort that has come suddenly upon us; it has been gradually culminating for a long period of thirty years." John A. Inglis, the chairman of the committee that drew up the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, said: "Most of us have had the matter under consideration for the last twenty years." And Lawrence M. Keit, one of the most active of the younger politicians, declared: "I have been engaged in this movement ever since I entered political life."

When President Buchanan, in his annual message in December, 1860, declared that "the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States" had produced the estrangement which had led to present troubles, the assertion was claimed by the politicians in the slave-labor States to be untrue. Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, had declared in a speech in October, 1858, that the discussion of slavery at the North had been very useful to them. After speaking of the great value of slavery to the cotton States, he observed: "Such has been for us the happy results of the Abolition discussion. So far our gain has been immense from this contest, savage and malignant as it has been. Now we have solved already the question of emancipation [from connection with the Northern States] by this re-examination and exposition of the false theories of religion, philanthropy, and political economy, which embarrassed the fathers in their days. At the North and in Europe, they caried havoc, and let loose upon us all the dogs of war. And how stands it now? Why, in this very quarter of a century, our slaves have doubled in numbers, and each slave has more than doubled in value." In July, 1859, Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, said he was not one of those who believed that the South had sustained any injury by these agitations. "So far," he said, "from the institution of African slavery in our section having been weakened or rendered less secure by the discussion, my deliberate judgment is that it has been greatly strengthened and fortified." Earl Russell, the British Premier, in a letter to Lord Lyons at Washington, in May, 1861, said that one of the Confederate commissioners told him that "the principal of the causes which led to secession was not slavery, but the very high price which, for the sake of protecting Northern manufactures, the South was obliged to pay for the manufactured goods which they required.

De Bow's Review was the acknowledged organ of the slave interest. In its issue for February, 1861, George Fitzhugh, a leading publicist of Virginia, commenting on the President's message, said: "It is a gross mistake to suppose that Abolition is the cause of dissolution between the North and the South. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and the Huguenots who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North. The former are master races; the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs." Mr. Fitzhugh added: "Our women are far in advance of our men in their zeal for disunion. They fear not war, for every one of them feels confident that when their sons or husbands are called to the field, they will have a faithful body-guard in their domestic servants. Slaves are the only body-guard to be relied on. They [the women] and the clergy lead and direct the disunion movement." The Charleston Mercury, edited by a son of Barnwell Rhett, and the chief organ of the conspirators of South Carolina, scorning the assertion that anything so harmless as "Abolition twaddle" had caused any sectional feelings, declared, substantially, that it was an abiding consciousness of the degradation of the "chivalric Southrons" being placed on an equality in government with "the boors of the North" that made "Southern gentlemen" desire disunion. It said, haughtily, "We are the most aristocratic people in the world. Pride of caste, and color, and privilege makes every man an aristocrat in feelings."