The analysis of developed motives in which the slaveholders' rebellion
had its origin, must naturally excite the inquiry in the American mind,
as to how far the slaveholding element can be trusted. As a political
force, we find it sowing the seeds of political discontent. As an
anti-democratic element, we find it plotting the overthrow of democratic
government. In its efforts to denationalize republican government in
America, it has not scrupled to seek aid from, and alliance with, the
haters of republican institutions every where. Under such calamitous
teachings as it has inflicted, can we longer conclude that it can, from
its aptitudes and nature, be converted into an element of national
strength? There is a South, and a great South, and would continue to be,
were there not a negro or slaveholder sojourning there. The seven
millions non-slaveholding population in the Southern States have rights,
social and political, based on the motive to maintain republican
government. The Constitution of the Union, as the highest principle of
fundamental law, guarantees in express terms, to every State, the form
of a republican government; and not less by implication, the essential
qualities of an actual one. It matters not how much the non-slaveholding
population of the South may have been deluded, nor how much it may have
been incited, under that delusion, to act as the instrument of its own
overthrow. This population is not less the object of just political
solicitude than any equal number of people North. That its general
education has not been advanced to the appreciative point, is its
misfortune. That it has been surrounded by a pro-slavery influence,
selfish, arrogant, and contemptuous of the interest of the masses, is
equally so. That it has been less favored than its brother-hood of free
labor in the North--that it has been placed under disabilities in the
comparison, are only additional reasons for increased solicitude for the
welfare and future advancement of this portion of Southern population.
While it has been imposed upon, and much of it deluded in its motives to
action, its actual condition is in reality coupled with every natural
incentive to alliance and adhesion to the National Government. It has
drunk the bitter cup of calamity in rebellion. It has tasted the dregs
of treason that lie at the bottom of political vice, and been victimized
by destitution, by the diseases of camp-life, by the casualties of the
bat