SLAVERY THE CONDITION FOR ALL LABORERS. 103 We must teach that slavery is necessary in all societies, as well to protect, as to govern the weak, poor, and ignorant. This is the opposite doctrine to that of the political economists. We should show that slave society, which is a series of subordinations, is consistent with Christian morality for fathers, masters, husbands, wives, children, and slaves, not being equals, rivals, competitors, and antagonists, best promote each other's selfish interests when they do most for those above or beneath them. Within the precincts of the family, including slaves, the golden rule is a practical and wise guide of conduct. But in free society, where selfishness, rivalry, and competition, are necessary to success, and almost to existence, this rule cannot be adopted in practice. It would reverse the whole action of such society, and make men martyrs to their virtues. * ** We, of the South, can build up an ethical code founded on the morality of the Bible, because human interests with us do not generally clash, but coincide. Without the family circle, it is True, competition and clashing interests exist, but slavery leaves few without the family, and the little competition that is left is among the rich and skilful, and serves to keep society progressive. It is enough that slavery will relieve common laborers of the evils of competition, and the exactions of skill and capital. * * * Southern thought will teach that protection and slavery must go hand in hand, for we cannot efficiently protect those whose conduct we cannot control. * * It is the duty of society to protect all its members, and it can only do so by subjecting each to that degree of government constraint, or slavery, which will best advance the good of each and of the whole. Thus ambition, or the love of power, properly directed, becomes the noblest of virtues, because power alone can enable us to be safely benevolent to the weak, poor, or criminal. To protect the weak, WE MUST FIRST ENSLAVE THEM, and this slavery must be either political and legal, or social. * * * Slavery is necessary as an educational institution, and is worth ten times all the common schools of the North. Such common schools teach only uncommonly bad morals, and prepare their inmates to gradute in the penitentiary, as the statistics of crime at the North abundantly prove. * We, of the South, assume that man has all along instinctively understood and practised that social and political government best suited to his nature, and that domestic slavery is, in the general, a natural and necessary part of that government, and that its absence is owing to a decaying diseased state of society, or to something exceptional in local circumstances, as in desert, or mountainous, or new countries, where competition is no evil, because capital has no mastery over labor. * WHO, NOW, IS RESPONSIBLE? The reader is no doubt willing to rest here; these lessons in political economy are sufficient for his present reflection. The divines and the economists whose views are now given, are among the foremost leaders of the rebellion; were those who, at the earliest moment, urged it on, and those whose teachings for twenty years past had helped to prepare the Southern people for the work in which they are to-day engaged, on a hundred fields of carnage and blood, where lie the bleaching bones of the flower of a generation of young men; and they are those who have, during every step in the progress of the war, by prayers and counsels, and active aid in the armies of treason, given all their might to bring forth these legitimate fruits of the seed they have sown. This is their work; for it they are responsible. The laborers and mechanics of the North,-all the "poor," indeed, of every class,-may see the feast which was elaborately prepared for them, and the destiny which inevitably awaited them, could the South have had their way in the unlimited and unchecked control of the Government; and they may learn, in this, the real character of that rebellion, to put down which the Government has called the people to arms. All may see, in the light of these sentiments, the real nature of that system, and the real character of its suppor ters, that have found apologists and extenuators in the North for these many years past, in the "adroitest debaters" and most "distinguished defenders of slavery and the South," in Church and State. While these men were sowing broadcast these seeds through every means in their power, it was deemed a labor of love to prepare for them the soil. While they could teach their doctrines at will, and pity WHO, NOW, IS RESPONSIBLE? 105 that condition of "free society," and mourn over that hardness of heart which would not receive them, it was deemed "agitation," "agitation," "agitation," nothing but wicked interference with matters which concerned them not, for pulpit, or press, or Church court, to raise even a gentle note of remonstrance. While some who had the sagacity to see what was inevitably coming upon the Church and upon the country from such teachings, and who had the boldness and the faithfulness to God's truth to declare it, --and whose far-sightedness the result has remarkably verified, have been, for that very faithfulness, exiled by the Church from posts of usefulness to which their qualifications and labors eminently entitled them, others, chiefly instrumental in this ostracism, have been honored by Southern votes with high stations, and have illustrated their faithfulness by eminent subserviency to those who so long controlled them. But for all deeds there is a day of reckoning; and we are quite sure the Church itself is beginning to understand those who have been true to her interests and those who have dishonored and betrayed her. When the day shall eventually come to write the history of this rebellion, it will not be difficult, so far as men of the North are concerned, to determine the true measure of their responsibility. And when the full character and aims of the rebel leaders shall be understood, it will be the judgment of the historian, as it is now the conviction of the loyal masses of the people, that such a disease as had thus fastened itself upon the body politic, could not be purged from it except through the agency of gunpowder -the means which the rebels themselves invoked. CHAPTER IV. RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEGINNING AND CONTINUING THE WAR. THE South admit that they took the initiative for secession, but charge the North with having begun the war. This charge has been made from the beginning, and is deemed so clear that it admits of no dispute. It is found in their public journals, secular and religious, in the speeches of their public men, and is formally set forth and reiterated in the State papers of the rebel President and the members of his Cabinet, and by the rebel Congress.* From the moment of the actual outbreak of hostilities to the present *"A sense of oppression and wrong, on the part of the North, in instituting and sustaining this war upon the South, is deep seated and abiding in their minds, and they will shrink from no sacrifices and turn away from no dangers in resisting it." -Presbytery of Western District, Tennessee, July, 1861. Rev. Dr. Thomas Smyth, of Charleston, S. C., when speaking of "the defensive character of the war of the South," says: "That war, as we have already proved, was provoked, threatened, perfidiously commenced, and openly proclaimed by the North."-Southern Presbyterian Review, April, 1863. In an "Address of (the Rebel) Congress to the People of the Confederate States," issued in February, 1864, it is said: "That a people, professing to be animated by Christian sentiment, and who had regarded our peculiar institution as a blot and blur upon the fair escutcheon of their common Christianity, should make war upon the South for doing what they had a perfect right to do, was deemed almost beyond belief by many of our wisest minds. These reasonable anticipations were doomed to disappointment. The red glare of battle kindled at Sumter, dissipated all hopes of peace, and the two Governments were arrayed in hostility against each other. We charge the responsibility of this war upon the United States. They are accountable for the blood and havoc and ruin it has caused. * * *The war in which we are engaged was wickedly, and against all our protests and most earnest efforts to the contrary, forced upon us." The rebel President, Jefferson Davis, in one of his messages to Congress, referred to in the above-mentioned Address, says: "Our efforts to avoid the war, forced on us as it was by the lust of conquest and the insane passions of our foes, are known to mankind." JOHN M. BOTTS ON SECESSION. 107 hour, they have persistently declared that the General Government, sustained by the body of the Northern people, are alone responsible for having begun, and for having continued, the war. They insist that secession was a peaceful remedy for their wrongs, against which war could not justly be made; and they declare, that, ever since war began, they have been ready to make peace, but that the General Government would not have peace. These are grave issues, lying at the root of the controversy in which the two sections of the country are involved. We cannot here canvass the alleged right of secession, which is claimed to be a Constitutional remedy for the grievances complained of. Our object, at present, is dif ferent. Whether secession, under the Constitution, be a justifiable remedy for any invasion of right or not, it is only necessary, in reference to the immediate object now in hand, to show, that the kind of secession which the South undertook, was early begun, and was vigorously prosecuted, by acts which can have no other terms of description than those which belong to the vocabulary of war. To assume that such acts are authorized under the Constitution, that they are what it contemplated as proper to be done in carrying out secession, that these are acts of peace, and that therefore secession is a peaceful remedy for supposed wrongs, are propositions so monstrous, that no one can be deceived by them the moment the acts in question come to be examined in their nature and the time of their occurrence. JOHN M. BOTTS ON SECESSION. As introductory to a brief narration of early events, well remembered by the whole world, we refer to a letter of the Hon. John Minor Botts, of Virginia, dated Richmond, |