March 28, 1861, The Charleston Mercury
In striving to arouse the South to the fatuity of the policy, which may be perpetrated under the Confederate States Constitution, by a two-thirds vote of future Congresses, we have already noticed the gross ignorance of the people of the North in regard to the true principles of republican government. Having no adequate conception of those wise and needful restrictions upon absolute power, whether vested in one man or many, by which alone the rights and liberty of all are protected, they substitute for free government a many headed tyranny, shifting, irresponsible and limitless, and hence are utterly unfit for political connection under a common government with those who would avoid mobocracy, agrarianism and anarchy.
In addition to their false and low views of republican government, we have spoken of the error of their idea of a general government for a confederation of republics. They mistake the creature for the creator–the agent for the supreme ultimate authority, and would make a consolidate nation, with unlimited power, out of a union of States, under a compact of powers, carefully delegated. They are, therefore, most dangerous confederates for those who would avoid a central despotism and escape the troubles and difficulties of another moral struggle with such anti-States rights tendencies.
Besides their mobocratic and consolidate political heresies, we have alluded to the radical hostility of the Northern people to the South and her institutions, in the great, vital question of slavery. Anti-slavery is a sentiment and a doctrine so thoroughly embedded in their moral, religious and political nature, that its eradication within many generations is a hopeless expectation. Hence they cannot but be domestic foes, aliens, and unsafe confederates for those in this section who would live in peace, beyond the reach of such inimical influences.
There is however, sill another potent reason for repudiating all future connection with Northern States, under a common government. The whole history of their past union with the South is stamped with rapacity, selfishness and bad faith. Their course on almost all the great questions that have agitated and disturbed the American States, proved them to be a people of shrewd, practical, utilitarian and material views, but, with individual exceptions, destitute alike of elevation of sentiment and character. Immediate interest swallows up and absorbs all other considerations. To the requirements and exigencies of this controlling motive, everything has been obliged to yield–whether justice, consistency, honor, or patriotism. From the DOUGLAS swindle, back to the war of 1812, and the Alien and Sedition laws, the tale is the same.
The Kansas-Nebraska Compromise was violated just as soon as in the case of Kansas, it became an object to violate it. The Missouri compromise was set aside just as soon as, in the case of California, the North were not to gain by it. The Mexican war was unpopular at the North, because it was a Southern war; and yet the South was excluded from the territory acquired. The acquisition of Texas was important to the security of the South; and yet it was with great difficulty, after one rejection, brought into the Union only from the apprehension that British goods from Texas would interfere with Northern interests. The tariff compromises of… was grossly violated just so soon as, in accordance with its terms, the Northern people were to give up their plunder of the South. The tariff of 1816, with its compromise reductions, prospectively made to save Northern manufacturers from alleged ruin, was set aside the very moment the South were to obtain the advantages for which they had acquiesced in temporary protection. The war of 1812, waged in behalf of Northern shipping, showed a people unpatriotic, selfish and treacherous. The Alien Law manifested an unscrupulous disposition to use power to gratify rapacity at the expense of the emigrants coming to our shores, whom they would now use against the South in filling up the territories for new Freesoil States. The Sedition law exhibited their pragmatical and selfish tyranny–being an attempt by penalties to muzzle the press and prevent all opposition to measures of the government. Their systematic refusal to carry out the provisions of the Constitution, for the return of fugitive slaves, is a piece with these special instances mentioned. Their disregard of the Fugitive Slave Law compromise of 1850, for which the Border States acquiesced in the California swindle, if not of such duration, is as notorious as the other. It is needless to multiply examples.
The people of the Northern States obey a law … than any which can be made in Constitutions and Congressional enactments by the peoples of the Southern States. The law which interest, ambition or fanaticism may, at any time, and on every occasion, suggest, is the law to which they are obedient and true. We ask the people of the South whether, with all their experience of the treachery and bad faith of those unsound and inimical aliens, they can entertain the idea of again admitting them into full fellowship as members of the same Confederate household? In our opinion, it would be madness.