heir own
recklessness of truth, and their knowledge that their case is one which
can not abide the scrutiny and the dispassionate judgment of
Christendom.

But the Southern Whites hate us vehemently. That is unfortunately true
of what would seem to be a large majority of them. Misled by artful
demagogues--excited by charges of Northern rapacity, perfidy, outrage,
and venom, to which no contradiction in their hearing is permitted--the
Poor Whites of the South really believe that the North is waging against
them an unprovoked and fiendish, war of subjugation and rapine. Of
course, they abhor us, and invoke all manner of curses on our heads. But
their hatred rests upon and is impelled by egregious falsehoods, and
will vanish when those falsehoods shall have been exposed and their
influence dissipated. The Whisky Rebels of Western Pennsylvania
intensely hated the rule of George Washington; but their rebellion being
crushed, all trace of the bitterness it engendered soon faded away.

As to the aristocracy of the South, it understands the case far better,
though individuals among its members are misled. The majority are
fighting for the extension and perpetuation of that Heaven-defying
system which is at once the idol and the bane of the South--for that
'peculiar institution' which makes one half the community helpless
victims to the pride, indolence, avarice, and lust of the other half.
The aristocracy are fighting for Slavery--neither less nor more--and
they fight bravely, desperately. Their existence as a privileged order
has been recklessly staked on the issue of the contest, and they mean to
triumph at any cost. To suppose that they can be vanquished yet leave
their bloody idol intact--that they can be compelled to reenter 'the
Union as it was,' and send their Slidells, Hammonds, Howell Cobbs, and
Masons, back to a Union Congress--is one of the wildest dreams that ever
flitted through a sane mind. Reunion or Disunion is possible; a
restoration of 'the Union as it was,' is as impracticable as a return of
the Eleventh Century or a replacement of the New World in the condition
wherein Columbus found it.

The Southern aristocracy must triumph or cease as an aristocracy to
exist. A flogged slaveholder is an anomaly that can not endure; he can
not rule his chattels if they know that he has succumbed to a force that
he would gladly have defied but could no longer resist. 'Poor White
trash' may endure and repay the contempt o