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and on which the more modern schools of New England have exhausted the lettered resources of their learned blacksmiths and Senatorial shoemakers. Mr. Webster, the representative of that imperfect and insolent education peculiar to New England, appears never to have known that Mr. Calhoun's doctrine was not of his own origination; that its suggestion, at least, came from one of the founders of the republic. We refer to that name which is apostolic in the earliest party divisions of America, and the enduring ornament of VirginiaThomas Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello. At a late period of his life, Mr. Jefferson said: "With respect to our State and Federal governments, I do not think their relations are correctly understood by foreigners. They suppose the former subordinate to the latter. This is not the case. They are coordinate departments of one simple and integral whole. But you may ask if the two departments should claim each the same subject of power, where is the umpire to decide between them? In cases of little urgency or importance, the prudence of both parties will keep them aloof from the questionable ground; but, if it can neither be avoided nor compromised, a Convention of the States must be called to ascribe the doubtful power to that department which they may think best."

Here was the first suggestion of the real safety of the Union; and it was this suggestion, reproduced by Calhoun, which the North slandered as Nullification, insulted as heresy, and branded as treason.

It is a remarkable circumstance that the South should have tamely allowed the Yankees to impose upon her political literature certain injurious terms, and should have adopted them to her own prejudice and shame. The world takes its impression from names; and the false party nomenclature which the North so easily fastened upon us, and which survives even in this war, has had a most important influence in obscuring our history, and especially in soliciting the prejudices of Europe.

The proposition of Mr. Calhoun to protect the Union by a certain constitutional and conservative barrier, the North designated Nullification, and the South adopted a name which was both a falsehood and a slander. The well-guarded and moderate system of negro servitude in the South, the North called Slavery; and this false and accursed name has been

permitted to pass current in European literature, associating and carrying with it the horrors of barbarism, and defiling us in the eyes of the world. The Democratic party in the South, which claimed equality under the Constitution, as a principle, and not merely as a selfish interest, was branded by the North as a pro-slavery party, and the South submitted to the desig

nation.

How little that great party deserved this title was well illustrated in the famous Kansas controversy; for the history of that controversy was simply this: the South struggled for the principle of equality in the Territories, without reference to the selfish interests of so-called Slavery, and even with the admission of the hopelessness of those interests in Kansas; while the North contended for the narrow, selfish, practical consequence of making Kansas a part of her Free-soil possessions. The proofs of this may be made in two brief extracts from these celebrated debates. These are so full of historical instruction that they supply a place here much better than any narrative or comment could do:

Mr. ENGLISH, of Indiana.-I think I may safely say that there is not a Southern man within the sound of my voice who will not vote for the admission of Kansas as a Free state, if she brings here a Constitution to that effect. Is there a Southern man here who will vote against the admission of Kansas as a Free State, if it be the undoubted will of the people of that Territory that it shall be a Free State?

MANY MEMBERS.-Not one.

At another stage of the Kansas debate occurs the following:

Mr. BARKSDALE, of Mississippi.—I ask you, gentlemen, on the other side of the House, of the Black Republican party, would you vote for the admission of Kansas into the Union, with a Constitution tolerating Slavery, if a hundred thousand people there wished it?

Mr. GIDDINGS, of Ohio.-I answer the gentleman that I will never associate, politically, with men of that character, if I can help it. I will never vote to compel Ohio to associate with another Slave State, if I can prevent it.

Mr. STANTON.-I will say, if the gentleman will allow me, that the Republican members of this House, so far as I know, will never vote for the admission of any Slave State north of 36° 30'.

We return to the influence of State institutions on America. We contend that they were not hostile to the Union, or

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malignant in their character; that, on the contrary, they were auxiliary to the Union; that they stimulated the national progress; that, in fact, they interpreted the true glory of America; and that it was especially these modifications of our national life which gave to the Union that certain moral sublimity so long the theme of American politicians. From these propositions we advance to a singular conclusion. It is that the moral veneration of the Union, which gives the key to so much of American history, was peculiarly a sentiment of the South; while in the North it was nothing more than a mere affectation.

This may sound strange to those who have read American history in the smooth surface of Yankee books; who remember Webster's apostrophes to the glorious Union, and Everett's silken rhetoric; whose political education has been manufactured to hand by the newspapers, and clap-traps of Yankee literature about "nullification" and treason. But it is easy of comprehension. The political ideas of the North excluded that of any peculiar moral character about the Union; the doctrine of State Rights was rejected by them for the prevalent notion that America was a single democracy; thus, the Union to them was nothing more than a geographical name, entitled to no peculiar claims upon the affections of the people. It was different with the South. The doctrine of State Rights gave to the Union its moral dignity; this doctrine was the only real possible source of sentimental attachment to the Union; and this doctrine was the received opinion of the Southern people, and the most marked peculiarity of their politics. The South did not worship the Union in the base spirit of commercial idolatry, as a painted machinery to secure tariffs and bounties, and to aggrandize a section. She venerated the Union because she discovered in it a sublime moral principle; because she regarded it as a peculiar association in which sovereign States were held by high considerations of good faith; by the exchanges of equity and comity; by the noble attractions of social order; by the enthused sympathies of a common destiny of power, honor, and renown. It was this galaxy which the South wore upon her heart, and before the clustered fires of whose glory she worshipped with an adoration almost Oriental. That Union is now dissolved; that splendid galaxy of stars is

no more in the heavens; and where once it shone, the fierce comet of war has burst, and writes a red history on the azure page.

But let this be said by the historian of this war: that the South loved the Union; dissolved it unwillingly; and, though she had had the political administration of it in her hands during most of its existence, surrendered it without a blot on its fame. "Do not forget," said a Southern Senator, when Mr. Seward boasted in the United States Senate that the North was about to take control at Washington, "it can never be forgotten-it is written on the brightest page of human history— that we, the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, and, after ruling her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence, we shall surrender her to you without a stain upon her honor, boundless in prosperity, incalculable in her strength, the wonder and the admiration of the world. Time will show what you will make of her; but no time can ever diminish our glory or your responsibility."

But there is one conclusive argument which we may apply to the common European opinion, and the half-educated notion of this country that the State institutions of America were schools of provincialism and estrangement. If such had been the case, the dissolution of the Union would have found the States that composed it a number of petty principalities opposed to each other, or, at least, diverse and heterogeneous. But this war has found no such thing. It has found the people of Virginia and Tennessee, the people of Missouri and South Carolina, entertaining the same political ideas, pursuing a single, common object in the war, and baptizing it in a common bloodshed on its fields of contest and carnage. The States of the Southern Confederacy offer to the world the example of its inhabitants as one people, homogeneous in their social systems, alike in their ideas, and unanimous in their resolves; and the States of the North afford similar illustrations of national unity. The war has found not discordant States, but two distinct nations, in the attitude of belligerents, differing in blood, in race, in social institutions, in systems of popular instruction, in political education and theories, in ideas, in manners; and the whole sharpened by a long and fierce political controversy, that has arrayed them at last as belligerents,

and interposed the gage of armed and bloody contest. The development of America has been a North and a South; not discordant States, but hostile nations. The present war is not for paltry theories of political parties, or for domestic institutions, or for rival administrations, but for the vital ideas of each belligerent, and the great stakes of national existence.

What have been the ideas which the North has developed or illustrated in this war? We will answer briefly.

The North presents to the world the example of a people corrupted by a gross material prosperity; their ideas of government, a low and selfish utilitarianism; their conceptions of civilization, prosperous railroads, penny newspapers, showy churches. Their own estimates of their civilization never penetrated beyond the mere surface and convenience of society; never took into account its unseen elements; the public virtue, the public spirit, the conservative principle, the love of order, the reverence of the past, all which go to make up the grand idea of human civilization.

It is amusing to the student of history to hear Mr. Sumner, of Massachusetts, asserting, with scholarly flourishes, that the South is barbarous, because she has no free schools: the sources of that half education in the North, which have been nurseries of insolence, irreverence of the past, infidelity in religion, and an itch for every new idea in the mad calendar of social reforms. It is yet more amusing to hear his Senatorial peer"the Natick cobbler." When, on the eve of the downfall of the government at Washington, a Southern Senator depicted the wealth that the South had poured into the lap of the Union, the elements it had contributed to its civilization, and the virtues it had brought to its adornment, Mr. Wilson, of Massachusetts, had this reply: "Massachusetts has more religious newspapers than all the slaveholding States of the

Union."

The people of the North have never studied politics as a moral science. They have no idea of government as an independent principle of truth, virtue and honor; to them it is merely an engine of material prosperity-a mere auxiliary appendage to a noisy, clattering world of trade, and steam, and telegraphs. It is this low commercial sense, of government

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