January 23, 1861, The New York Herald
Eighty five years ago, the population of the United States, numbered little over three millions. According to the recent census, it appears that the States and Territories, in 1860, contained thirty one millions of inhabitants. Our national wealth, at the time of the declaration of the independence from Great Britain of the thirteen colonies, was small. The flag of the country is now carried into every part of the world; our means of inter-State communication have been created at an expense of thousands of millions of dollars; the agricultural, manufacturing, commercial and financial prosperity of the republic, are the wonder and admiration of every quarter of the globe. The energy, enterprise, skill and industry of our citizens, both North and South, have made us the equals in power of Great Britain and France; and, did we but remain true to ourselves, we should continue to be invincible against attack, and self sufficient for all purposes of internal and external progress and aggrandizement. Yet a canker has slowly and surely spread within the last few years, threatening to devour the confederation politically and to destroy it by the most rapid decay known in the history of nations. To whom has our unexampled growth as a people been owing, and who are they whose intrigues and ambition are undermining it? Are the hands that built our political edifice with so much wisdom and sagacity now turned to rend it to pieces, or is the suicidal crisis which convulses it, and which is hurrying it to ruin, attributable to a different class of society?
A careful analysis of the State of the Union must convince every candid mind, that five sixths of those within its limits, who are entitled to the right of suffrage, are in favor of its preservation. Out of the forty eighty hundred thousand voters in the country, probably not over quarter of a million are engaged in the pernicious work of mischief, which threatens us with civil war, bloodshed and the corollary horrors which sectional strife may engender. The vast majority of our citizens are law abiding and peace loving. They view with dismay the approaches of a political hurricane which, if permitted to rage, must shake the fabric of the liberties which their forefathers purchased at such a cost, to its very foundations. They consist of the moneyed, hard working elements, that constitute the worth, intelligence, integrity and patriotism of both the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. The planters of the South, including these in cotton growing districts most interested in fostering African slavery; the manufacturers, merchants, financiers, farmers, mechanics and honest laborers of the North, are, as classes, alive to the perils which surround them, and prepared to use every endeavor to avert them. They are, and ever have been, the bees in the national hive. Those who are occupied in the reasonable work of overturning it, and wasting the fruits of the toilsome labor of nearly a century, are drones, who have preyed upon it from the beginning, but have never contributed any share to the general good.
The Astors, the Taylors, the Laws, the Vanderbilts, the Perits, the Stewarts, are always conservative in their sentiments. Sometimes, they may seek for an undue monopoly of power, and resort to means of acquiring wealth which trespass upon the rights of others around them; but to them, and the industrial masses, higher and lower in the scale of society, is the strength owing that has made American what it has become. Mercantile, railroad, steamboat, manufacturing, mechanical, agricultural enterprise, have laid the cornerstone that upholds the thirty three Corinthian pillars of the republic. They are the might heart from which ebbs and flows the life blood of the nation. If they were as strong and united politically, as they are in mutual commercial trust, the bonds that unite the States together could never be sundered, and the Union would be imperishable. Unfortunately, their eyes have been too much turned downwards, and neither upwards nor around them, within the last thirty years. They have adopted as an axiom, that the prosperity which is, must ever be, and have forgotten the sacred duties which, as citizens, they above all others are called upon to perform. Neglecting to vote; abstaining from the continual, critical study of passing events which was esteemed a religious obligation by the Hancocks, Adamses and Quincys of the time of the Revolution, they have fallen into a deadly apathy and alienated the influence they legitimately possess. The consequence of their neglect was not at once apparent. The social system felt no pain, and the encroachments of the deadly disease under which it was laboring remained unheeded. The time of anguish and trouble has, however, come at last, and it is the question of the hour whether it is too late to apply a remedy.
It is only necessary to look towards Washington, to understand into what miserable, irresponsible hands, the rule of the country has now fallen. As desolate blank is beheld there of every noble impulse from which sound and healthy legislation should proceed. The representatives of the southern States, are many of them the creatures of a truculent mob, the imperious, domineering, insolent, shallow pated demagogues, whom the surface scum of society in the slaveholding States would fitly choose to hector, bully and bluster for them in behalf of disunion. They are not the statesmen of the communities from which they come; neither do the planters and cultivators of the soil who own the negroes of the south, bestow upon them their confidence. Empty in pocket, brain and character; with everything to gain and nothing to lose by disorder, they agitate perpetually for the purpose of keeping themselves before the republic. Incumbents of office at and from the North are equally sunken in the moral and political scale. Look at them, and study their past histories, one by one. Peculators, speculators, venal slaves of lobby schemes; the meanest, vilest, most degraded caterers to the latest and most absurd passion, suggested by clergy ambition or local greed of pelf ; they see the anarchy towards which the country is hastening with gigantic footsteps, but make no attempt whatever to prevent it. They not only interpose their brief authority as a screen between the popular voice and a peaceful settlement of our national difficulties, but they strive to increase them, and to hurry the north and south into acts of violence which shall array one section in arms against the other. The destruction of our national prosperity, if it takes place, will be their act, and the guilt will lie at their door of the foulest acts of treason and crime that ever were consummated.
It has become evident that no remedy whatever can be applied to the political malady, under which the Union is laboring, excepting by the people of the United States themselves. Let the integrity and intelligence of the country, both North and South, take every occasion of making themselves heard, and a final check be given to the demagogic sway that has lately prevailed. If it cannot be done with effect any sooner, let the State elections which will speedily take place in New England, be the point towards which conservative citizens shall rally, to rescue, the country which they have built up, from the chaos into which sectionalism, inspired by those who find their profit in whirlwind and desolation, would engulf its prosperity.