his politicians' conspiracy, this
slaveholders' rebellion, as it was variously called by those who sought
its source, now in the disappointed ambition of the Southern leaders,
now in the desperate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy to
perpetuate their power, and to secure forever their proprietorship in
their "human chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern people were
but puppets in the hands of political wirepullers, or blind followers of
hectoring "patricians." To those who know the Southern people nothing
can be more absurd; to those who know their personal independence, to
those who know the deep interest which they have always taken in
politics, the keen intelligence with which they have always followed
the questions of the day. The court-house green was the political
university of the Southern masses, and the hustings the professorial
chair, from which the great political and economical questions of the
day were presented, to say the least, as fully and intelligently as in
the newspapers to which so much enlightenment is attributed. There was
no such system of rotten boroughs, no such domination of a landed
aristocracy, throughout the South as has been imagined, and venality,
which is the disgrace of current politics, was practically unknown. The
men who represented the Southern people in Washington came from the
people, and not from a ring. Northern writers who have ascribed the firm
control in Congress of the national government which the South held so
long to the superior character, ability, and experience of its
representatives, do not seem to be aware that the choice of such
representatives and their prolonged tenure show that in politics, at
least, the education of the Southerner had not been neglected. The rank
and file then were not swayed simply by blind passion or duped by the
representations of political gamesters. Nor did the lump need the
leavening of the large percentage of men of the upper classes who served
as privates, some of them from the beginning to the end of the war. The
rank and file were, to begin with, in full accord with the great
principles of the war, and were sustained by the abiding conviction of
the justice of the cause. Of course, there were in the Southern army, as
in every army, many who went with the multitude in the first
enthusiastic rush, or who were brought into the ranks by the needful
process of conscription; but it is not a little remarkable that few of
the po