n the descendants of their ancient enemies, the
Cavaliers,--who were already rivalling them in the South, and who, as we
have shown, were equally ready to cast or lift the gauntlet. Occupying
the very extremes of religious faith, radically differing in their views
of public polity, of bitterly hostile antecedents and traditions, the
one looking upon the other as an outcast from salvation itself, and the
other in its turn nothing loth brands its opponent with the epithets of
surly, hypocritical, psalm-singing knaves, then as now, and as they have
ever been since the foundations of our country were laid, these two
classes stood arrayed against each other in every respect save that of
open, carnal warfare. The bitterest of foes in the beginning,
diametrically opposed in every possible respect, each has plodded on in
his own narrow path, and the two paths have continually diverged to our
day, and the present outbreak is but as the breaking of a sore which has
long been ripe. It is of such antagonisms that nations are made: it is
but differences such as these that have separated the common stock of
Adam into so many distinct races and nationalities through all the ages
of the world. Such a result we see to-day in our country, in two
separate and distinct nations, hitherto nominally united under one form
of government--nations as distinct as ever were the Roman and the Greek.
As the Cavalier of the Cromwellian era was a horror to the pharisaical
Puritan, and the Puritan in his turn a contempt and an abomination to
the reckless, pleasure-hunting Cavalier, so to-day is the
'psalm-singing, clock-peddling Yankee' a foul odor to the fastidious
nostrils of the lordly Southerner, and the reckless prodigal, dissipated
and soul-selling planter a thorn in the flesh of Puritan morality. The
Yankee is to the Southerner a synonym for all that is low and base and
cunning, and the Southerner is to the Yankee the embodiment of all
worthlessness and crime. The same spirit is observable in those Northern
States which were settled by a mixed emigration from both portions of
the country, and the fact is well known that even in those loyal Western
States where the Southern element most predominates, is found the
bitterest hatred and denunciation of the Yankee; so that he is no sage
who draws the line east and west, north and south, and in every mixed
community, between the descendant of the Cavalier, and the man of
Puritan stock. Shall any one say