Chapter XX: The South Have Done with Argument

“Yea, doubtless,” saith the Abolitionist, “for reason fails them.” And so we have all done with argument; for we shall not stop to reply to this. “The South know their rights,” said a Southern gentleman the other day on the floor of Congress, very significantly, and in relation to this subject. This, we believe, is the present common feeling of the slaveholding States. They have made up their minds; and we think they will have the sympathy of the reasonable part of mankind. Their present attitude is that of pointing the people of this country to the bulwark of the Federal Constitution; and if that will not protect them, “they know their rights.” We do not quote this language to expose the Southerners to the charge of holding up a menace; for we do not accept it as such, and think it would be unfair for any body to do so. They stand on the defensive; they have been assailed, and are yet assailed; they have felt themselves insulted on the floor of Congress by indirect attempts to invade their rights of State sovereignty; they have been compelled to special legislation and other public action to defend their own territories from violation; they have dreamed of seeing their wives and children butchered, and their houses pillaged and burned; they have seen, in imagination, and as a natural consequence of the Abolition movement unresisted and unchecked, all these and many other horrors of a like kind, enacted before their eyes; they have seen the Government upturned, society dissolved, and anarchy stalking amid the triumphs of its own desolation over their fields; and with such prospects before them, as the result of a foreign interference, organized in open violation of the laws of the land, and in the face of a solemn national compact forbidding such aggression, and engaging to protect and defend them against it, are they not entitled to say--“We know our rights?” How long must they suffer--how long must they be menaced by such invasion, before they may say, we will suffer it no longer? A day of anxiety is as a year of torment; a year of such suspense, is as an age of agony.

And what will they do? Why, clearly, break loose from the Union, to which, generally, they have already made up their minds, in case of necessity, they being judges--if the straws in the wind are any sure indication of its career--“Necessity needs no law.” If the Government of the country will not protect them, they must protect themselves, or try to do so. They may fail, and prove impotent; but when men are insulted and outraged, especially the men of the South, they are not nice calculators of consequences; and it is for us of the North to determine, whether we are willing to see our brethren of the South driven to such a resort, by the continued action of an unlawful combination, that exists and has grown up among ourselves; whether, indeed, we are willing to see the Government of this proud Republic rent asunder by such a cause, and to hazard the consequences.

If any body thinks these remarks are not well founded, we are sorry they are not better observers of the symptomatic phenomena of our own society. If they should think them unreasonable and out of place, we are sorry for that also, as we have judged otherwise, and take leave to invite their attention to the next chapter.