ward that peculiar institution of the South
which is distinctively known to be, in some way, fundamentally related
to this unprovoked and unreasonable attack. While the South was
attributing to the whole North a rabid abolitionism; while the North
itself was half suspecting that it had committed some wrong in the
excess of its devotion to human rights; the simple fact on the contrary
was, that the whole North had been and was still 'psychologized' into a
positive respect for slavery, and for slaves as property, which we feel
for no other species of property whatsoever. The existence of this
sentiment of veneration for what our Abolition apostles have for some
years been denominating the 'sum of all villanies,' is a curious fact
in the spiritual history of our people, which had very generally escaped
critical observation.

At the South, the individual planter, owning and possessing ten slaves,
of an aggregate value, it may be, of ten thousand dollars, ranks higher,
socially, is regarded indeed, in some subtile way, as a richer man, than
the merchant or banker who may be worth his hundred thousand or half
million of dollars, provided he has no slaves. To come to be the owner
of negroes, and of more and more negroes, is the social ambition, the
aristocratic purpose and pretension of the whole Southern people. It is
by virtue of this mystical _prestige_ of the institution itself; which
couples the charms of wealth with the exercise of authority, or a
certain show of official supremacy on the part of the master; which
begins by subjugating the imagination of the poorer classes, the whites
throughout the South, whose direct interests are wholly opposed to those
of the slaveholding class, and ends by subjecting them, morally and
spiritually, and binding them in the bonds of the most abject allegiance
to the oligarchy of slaveholders. It is in this way that the South is
made a unit out of elements seemingly the most incongruous and radically
opposed. For a series of years past, the South has sent forth its annual
caravan of wealthy planters to visit the watering places, and inhabit
the great hotels of the North. Coming in intimate contact with the
superior classes of our own population; floating up in the atmosphere of
serene self-complacency; radiating, shedding down upon those with whom
they chanced to associate, the ineffable consciousness of their own
unquestionable superiority; they have communicated without effort on
thei