n Christianity, in education and
universal liberty. They and their progeny have moved almost on a line
due west, to the Pacific Ocean, infusing their energy, their ideas of
government, of civil liberty, of an advanced Christian civilization,
with a belief in man's equality before the law. These ideas and thoughts
have become imbedded in the minds of the Northern people so firmly that
they will fight to maintain them; will make them temporarily a success,
and would make them permanent but for their habit of moving so rapidly
in the direction of business and the accumulation of wealth, which
prepares the mind to surrender everything to the accomplishment of this
single object. The Southern inhabitants are almost entirely descended
from impetuous, hot-blooded people. Their ancestors that landed at
Jamestown, and later along the Southern Atlantic coast within our
borders, were of an adventurous and warlike people. Their descendants
have driven westward almost on a parallel line with the Northern people
to the borders of Mexico, occasionally lapping over the Northern line.
Their thoughts, ideas, manners and customs have been impressed upon the
people wherever they have gone, by the pretense, always foremost and
uppermost, as if a verity, that they were the most hospitable and
chivalric of any people in America. Their civilization was different.
Their arguments were enforced by the pistol and bowie-knife upon their
equals, and slaves subjected to their will by the lash and
bloodhound--the death of a man, white or black, being considered no more
than merely a reduction of one in the enumeration of population. They
have opposed common schools for fear the poorer classes of whites might
have an opportunity of contesting at some time the honors of office,
that being the great ambition of Southern society. They would not allow
the slave to be educated for fear he might learn that he was a man,
having rights above the brute with which he has always been held on a
par. The aristocracy only were educated. And this was generally done in
the North, where the facilities were good; and by sending them from home
it kept down the envy and ambition of the poorer classes, where, if they
could have seen the opportunity of acquiring knowledge it might have
stimulated them to greater exertion for the purpose of storing their
minds with something useful in extricating themselves from an obedience
to the mere will of the dominating class. Those peo