“From the best estimates that I have been able to make, I put down the white people who ought to work, and who do not,or who are so employed as to be wholly unproductive to the State, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Any man who is an observer of things could hardly pass through our country, without being struck with the fact that all the capital, enterprise, and intelligence, is employed in directing slave labor; and the consequence is, that a large portion of our poor white people are wholly neglected, and are suffered to while away an existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest. It is an evil of vast magnitude, and nothing but a change in public sentiment will effect its cure. These people must be brought into daily contact with the rich and intelligent—they must be stimulated to mental action, and taught to appreciate education and the comforts of civilized life; and this, we believe, may be effected only by the introduction of manufactures. My experience at Graniteville has satisfied me that unless our poor people can be brought together in villages, and some means of employment afforded them, it will be an utterly hopeless effort to undertake to educate them. We have collected at that place about eight hundred people, and as likely looking a set of country girls as may be found—industrious and orderly people, but deplorably ignorant, three-fourths of the adults not being able to read or to write their own names.“It is only necessary to build a manufacturing village of shanties, in a healthy location, in any part of the State, to have crowds of these people around you, seeking employment at half the compensation given to operatives at the North. It is indeed painful to be brought in contact with such ignorance and degradation.”
“From the best estimates that I have been able to make, I put down the white people who ought to work, and who do not,or who are so employed as to be wholly unproductive to the State, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Any man who is an observer of things could hardly pass through our country, without being struck with the fact that all the capital, enterprise, and intelligence, is employed in directing slave labor; and the consequence is, that a large portion of our poor white people are wholly neglected, and are suffered to while away an existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest. It is an evil of vast magnitude, and nothing but a change in public sentiment will effect its cure. These people must be brought into daily contact with the rich and intelligent—they must be stimulated to mental action, and taught to appreciate education and the comforts of civilized life; and this, we believe, may be effected only by the introduction of manufactures. My experience at Graniteville has satisfied me that unless our poor people can be brought together in villages, and some means of employment afforded them, it will be an utterly hopeless effort to undertake to educate them. We have collected at that place about eight hundred people, and as likely looking a set of country girls as may be found—industrious and orderly people, but deplorably ignorant, three-fourths of the adults not being able to read or to write their own names.
“It is only necessary to build a manufacturing village of shanties, in a healthy location, in any part of the State, to have crowds of these people around you, seeking employment at half the compensation given to operatives at the North. It is indeed painful to be brought in contact with such ignorance and degradation.”
Again he asks:—
“Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation? Many a one is reared inproudSouth Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in which he has not, some part of the time, been stinted for meat. Many a mother is there who will tell you that her children are but scantily provided with bread,and much more scantily with meat; and, if they be clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty allowances of food. These may be startling statements, but they are nevertheless true; and if not believed in Charleston, the members of our legislature who have traversed the State in electioneering campaigns can attest the truth.”
In an article on “Manufactures in South Carolina,” published some time ago inDeBow’s Review, J. H. Taylor, of Charleston (S. C.) says:—
“There is in some quarters, a natural jealousy of the slightest innovation upon established habits, and because an effort has been made to collect the poor and unemployed white population into our new factories, fears have arisen that some evil would grow out of the introduction of such establishments among us. * * * The poor man has a vote as well as the rich man, and in our State the number of the former will largely overbalance the latter. So long as these poor but industrious people can see no mode of living except by a degrading operation of work with the negro upon the plantation, they will be content to endure life in its most discouraging forms, satisfied that they areabovethe slave, though faring often worse than he.”
Speaking in favor of manufactures, the Hon. J. H. Lumpkin, of Georgia, said in 1852:—
“It is objected that these manufacturing establishments will become the hotbeds of crime. But I am by no means ready to concede that our poor, degraded, half-fed, half-clothed, and ignorant population—without Sabbath Schools, or any other kind of instruction, mental or moral, or without any just appreciation of character—will be injured by giving them employment, which will bring them under the oversight of employers, who will inspire them with self-respect by taking an interest in their welfare.”
In a paper on the “Extension of Cotton and Wool Factories at the South,” Mr. Steadman, of Tennessee, says:—
“In Lowell, labor is paid the fair compensation of 80 cents a day for men, and $2 a week for women, beside board, while in Tennessee the average compensation for labor does not exceed 50 cents per day for men, and $1,25 per week for women.”
In the course of a speech which he delivered in Congress several years ago, Mr. T. L. Clingman, of North Carolina, said:—
“Our manufacturing establishments can obtain the raw material (cotton) at nearly two cents on the pound cheaper than the New-England establishments. Labor is likewise one hundred per cent. cheaper. In the upper parts of the State, the labor of either a free man or a slave, including board, clothing, &c., can be obtained for from $110 to $120 per annum. It will cost at least twice that sum in New-England. The difference in the cost of female labor, whether free or slave, is even greater.”
The Richmond (Va.)Dispatchsays:—
“We will only suppose that the ready-made shoes imported into this city from the North, and sold here, were manufactured in Richmond. What a great addition it would be to the means of employment! How many boys and females would find the means of earning their bread, who are now suffering for a regular supply of the necessaries of life.”
A citizen of New-Orleans, writing inDeBow’s Review, says:—
“At present the sources of employment open to females (save in menial offices) are very limited; and an inability to procure suitable occupation is an evil much to be deplored, as tending in its consequences to produce demoralization. The superior grades of female labor may be considered such as imply a necessity foreducation on the part of the employee, while the menial class is generally regarded as of the lowest; and in a slave State, this standard is ‘in the lowest depths, a lower deep,’ from the fact that, by association, it is a reduction of the white servant to the level of their colored fellow-menials.”
Black slave labor, though far less valuable, is almost invariably better paid than free white labor. The reason is this: The fiat of the oligarchy has made itfashionableto “have negroes around,” and there are, we are grieved to say, many non-slaveholding-whites, (lickspittles,) who, in order to retain on their premises a hired slave whom they falsely imagine secures to them not only the appearance of wealth, but also a position of high social standing in the community, keep themselves in a perpetual strait.
Last Spring we made it our special business to ascertain the ruling rates of wages paid for labor, free and slave, in North Carolina. We found sober, energetic white men, between twenty and forty years of age, engaged in agricultural pursuits at a salary of $84 per annum—including board only; negro men, slaves, who performed little more than half the amount of labor, and who were exceedingly sluggish, awkward, and careless in all their movements, were hired out on adjoining farms at an average of about $115 per annum, including board, clothing, and medical attendance. Free white men and slaves were in the employ of the North Carolina Railroad Company; the former, whose services, in our opinion, were at least twice as valuable as the services of the latter, received only $12 per month each; the masters of the latter received $16 per month for every slave so employed. Industrious, tidywhite girls, from sixteen to twenty years of age, had much difficulty in hiring themselves out as domestics in private families for $40 per annum—board only included; negro wenches, slaves, of corresponding ages, so ungraceful, stupid and filthy that no decent man would ever permit one of them to cross the threshold of his dwelling, were in brisk demand at from $65 to $70 per annum, including victuals, clothes, and medical attendance. These are facts, and in considering them, the students of political and social economy will not fail to arrive at conclusions of their own.
Notwithstanding the greater density of population in the free States, labor of every kind is, on an average, about one hundred per cent. higher there than it is in the slave States. This is another important fact, and one that every non-slaveholding white should keep registered in his mind.
Poverty, ignorance, and superstition, are the three leading characteristics of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. Many of them grow up to the age of maturity, and pass through life without ever owning as much as five dollars at any one time. Thousands of them die at an advanced age, as ignorant of the common alphabet as if it had never been invented. All are more or less impressed with a belief in witches, ghosts, and supernatural signs. Few are exempt from habits of sensuality and intemperance. None have anything like adequate ideas of the duties which they owe either to their God, to themselves, or to their fellow-men. Pitiable, indeed, in the fullest sense of the term, is their condition.
It is the almost utter lack of an education that hasreduced them to their present unenviable situation. In the whole South there is scarcely a publication of any kind devoted to their interests. They are now completely under the domination of the oligarchy, and it is madness to suppose that they will ever be able to rise to a position of true manhood, until after the slave power shall have been utterly overthrown.
It is with some degree of hesitation that we add a chapter on Southern Literature—not that the theme is inappropriate to this work; still less, that it is an unfruitful one; but our hesitation results from our conscious inability, in the limited time and space at our command, to do the subject justice. Few, except those whose experience has taught them, have any adequate idea of the amount of preparatory labor requisite to the production of a work into which the statistical element largely enters; especially is this so, when the statistics desired are not readily accessible through public and official documents. The author who honestly aims at entire accuracy in his statements, may find himself baffled for weeks in his pursuit of a single item of information, not of much importance in itself perhaps, when separately considered, but necessary in its connection with others, to the completion of a harmonious whole. Not unfrequently, during the preparation of the preceding pages, have we been subjected to this delay and annoyance.
The following brief references to the protracted preparatory labors and inevitable delays to which authors aresubjected, may interest our readers, and induce them to regard with charity any deficiencies, either in detail or in general arrangement, which, owing to the necessary haste of preparation, these concluding pages of our work may exhibit:
Goldsmith was engaged nine years in the preparation of “The Traveller,” and five years in gathering and arranging the incidents of his “Deserted Village,” and two years in their versification.
Bancroft, the American Historian, has been more than thirty years engaged upon his History of the United States, from his projection of the work to the present date; and that History is not yet completed.
Hildreth, a no less eminent historian, from the time he began to collect materials for his History of the United States to the date of its completion, devoted no less than twenty-five years to the work.
Webster, our great lexicographer, gave thirty-five years of his life in bringing his Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language to the degree of accuracy and completeness in which we now find it.
Dr. John W. Mason, after ten years’ labor in the accumulation of materials for a Life of Alexander Hamilton, was compelled to relinquish the work on account of impaired health.
Mr. James Banks, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, who recently delivered a lecture upon the Life and Character of Flora McDonald, was eighteen years in the collection of his materials.
Oulibicheff, a distinguished Russian author, spent twenty-five years in writing the Life of Mozart.
Examples of this kind might be multiplied to an almost indefinite extent. Indeed, almost all the poets, prose-writers, painters, sculptors, composers, and other devotees of Art, who have won undying fame for themselves, have done so through long years of earnest and almost unremitted toil.
We are quite conscious that the fullness and accuracy of statement which are desirable in this chapter cannot be attained in the brief time allowed us for its completion; but, though much will necessarily be omitted that ought to be said, we shall endeavor to make no statement of facts which are not well authenticated, and no inferences from the same which are not logically true. We can only promise to do the best in our power, with the materials at our command, to exhibit the inevitable influence of slavery upon Southern Literature, and to demonstrate that the accursed institution so cherished by the oligarchy, is no less prejudicial to our advancement in letters, than it is destructive of our material prosperity.
What is the actual condition of Literature at the South? Our question includes more than simple authorship in the various departments of letters, from the compilation of a primary reader to the production of a Scientific or Theological Treatise. We comprehend in it all the activities engaged in the creation, publication, and sale of books and periodicals, from the penny primer to the heavy folio, and from the dingy, coarse-typed weekly paper, to the large, well-filled daily.
It were unjust to deny a degree of intellectual activity to the South. It has produced a few good authors—a few competent editors, and a moderately large number of clever magazinists, paragraphists, essayists and critics. Absolutely, then, it must be conceded that the South has something that may be called a literature; it is only when we speak of her in comparison with the North, that we say, with a pardonably strong expression, “The South has no literature.” This was virtually admitted by more than one speaker at the late “Southern Convention” at Savannah. Said a South Carolina orator on that occasion: “It is important that the Southshould havea literature of her own, to defend her principles and her rights;” a sufficiently plain concession that she has not, now, such a literature. Butfactsspeak more significantly than the rounded periods of Convention orators. Let us look at facts, then.
First, turning our attention to the periodical literature of the South, we obtain these results: By the census of 1850, we ascertain that the entire number of periodicals, daily, semi-weekly, weekly, semi-monthly, monthly and quarterly, published in the slave States, including the District of Columbia, were seven hundred and twenty-two. These had an aggregateyearlycirculation of ninety-two million one hundred and sixty-seven thousand one hundred and twenty-nine. (92,167,129). The number of periodicals, of every class, published in the non-slaveholding States (exclusive of California) was one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three, with an aggregate yearly circulation of three hundred and thirty-three million three hundred and eighty-six thousand and eighty-one. (333,386,081).
We are aware that there may be inaccuracies in the foregoing estimates; but the compilers of the census, not we, are responsible for them. Besides, the figures are unquestionably as fair for the South as for the North; we accept them, therefore, as a just basis of our comparisons. Nearly seven years have elapsed since these statistics were taken, and these seven years have wrought an immense change in the journalism of the North, without any corresponding change in that of the South. It is noteworthy that, as a general thing, the principal journals of the free States are more comprehensive in their scope, more complete in every department, and enlist, if not a higher order of talent, at leastmoretalent, than they did seven years ago. This improvement extends not only to the metropolitan, but to the country papers also. In fact, the very highest literary ability, in finance, in political economy, in science, in statism, in law, in theology, in medicine, in the belles-lettres, is laid under contribution by the journals of the non-slaveholding States. This is true only to a very limited degree of Southern journals. Their position, with but few exceptions, is substantially the same that it was ten years ago. They are neither worse nor better—the imbecility and inertia which attaches to everything which slavery touches, clings to them now as tenaciously as it did when Henry A. Wise thanked God for the paucity of newspapers in the Old Dominion, and the platitudes of “Father” Ritchie were recognized as the political gospel of the South. They have not, so far as we can learn, increased materially in number, nor in the aggregate of their yearly circulation. In the free States no week passes that does not add to the numberof their journals, and extend the circle of their readers and their influence. Since the census tables to which we have referred were prepared, two of the many excellent weekly journals of which the city of New-York can boast, have sprung into being, and attained an aggregate circulation more than twice as large as that of the entire newspaper press of Virginia in 1850—and exceeding, by some thousands, the aggregate circulation of the two hundred and fifty journals of which Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, could boast at the time above-mentioned.
In this connection, we beg leave to introduce the following letter, kindly furnished us by the proprietors of the N. Y. Tribune, in answer to enquiries which we addressed to them:—
Tribune Office, New York,30th May, 1857.Mr. H. R. Helper,Sir:—In answer to your inquiry we inform you that we employ in our building one hundred and seventy-six persons regularly: this does not include our carriers and cartmen, nor does it include the men employed in the Job Office in our building. During the past year we have used in printingThe Tribune, Forty-four thousand nine hundred and seventy nine (44,979) reams of paper, weighing two million three hundred and ten thousand one hundred and thirty (2,310,130) pounds. We publish one hundred and seventy-six thousand copies of our weekly edition, which goes to press, the second form, at 7½ o’clock, A. M. and is finished at 2 A. M. the next morning. Our mailers require eighteen to nineteen hours to mail our Weekly, which makes from thirty to thirty-two cart loads.Very respectfully,Greeley & McElrath.
Tribune Office, New York,30th May, 1857.
Mr. H. R. Helper,Sir:—
In answer to your inquiry we inform you that we employ in our building one hundred and seventy-six persons regularly: this does not include our carriers and cartmen, nor does it include the men employed in the Job Office in our building. During the past year we have used in printingThe Tribune, Forty-four thousand nine hundred and seventy nine (44,979) reams of paper, weighing two million three hundred and ten thousand one hundred and thirty (2,310,130) pounds. We publish one hundred and seventy-six thousand copies of our weekly edition, which goes to press, the second form, at 7½ o’clock, A. M. and is finished at 2 A. M. the next morning. Our mailers require eighteen to nineteen hours to mail our Weekly, which makes from thirty to thirty-two cart loads.
Very respectfully,Greeley & McElrath.
Throughout the non-slaveholding States, the newspaper or magazine that hasnotimproved during the last decade of years, is an exception to the general rule. Throughout the entire slaveholding States, the newspaper or magazine thathasimproved during that time, is no less an exception to the general rule that there obtains. Outside of the larger cities of the South, there are not, probably, half a dozen newspapers in the whole slaveholding region that can safely challenge a comparison with the country-press of the North. What that country-press was twenty years ago, the country-press of the South is now.
We do not deny that the South has produced able journalists; and that some of the newspapers of her principal cities exhibit a degree of enterprise and talent that cannot fail to command for them the respect of all intelligent men. But these journals, we regret to say, are marked exceptions to the general condition of the Southern press; and even the best of these fall far below the standard of excellence attained by the leading journals of the North. In fact, whether our comparison embraces quantity only, or extends to both quantity and quality, it is found to be immeasurably in favor of the non-slaveholding States, which in journalism, as in all other industrial pursuits, leave their slavery-cursed competitors at an infinite distance behind them, and thus vindicate the superiority of free institutions, which, recognizing labor as honorable, secure its rewards for all.
The literary vassalage of the South to the North constitutes in itself a most significant commentary upon the diatribes of the former concerning “a purely Southernliterature.” To begin at the beginning—the Alphabetical Blocks and Educational tables from which our Southern abecedarian takes his initial lesson, were projected and manufactured in the North. Going forward a step, we find the youngling intent in spelling short sentences, or gratifying his juvenile fondness for the fine arts by copying the wood-cuts from his Northern primer. Yet another step, and we discover him with his Sanders’ Reader, his Mitchell’s Geography, his Emerson’s Arithmetic, all produced by Northern mind and Northern enterprise. There is nothingwrongin this; it is only a little ridiculous in view of the fulminations of the Southern proslavery press against the North. Occasionally however we are amused by the efforts of the oligarchs to make their own school-books, or to root out of all educational text-books every reference to the pestilential heresy of freedom. A “gentleman” in Charleston, S. C. is devoting his energies to the preparation of a series of pro-slavery elementary works, consisting of primers, readers, &c.—and lo! they are all printed, stitched and bound north of Mason and Dixon’s line! A singlefactlike this is sufficient to overturn whole folios oftheoryconcerning the divinity of slavery. The truth is, that, not school-books alone, but works of almost every class produced by the South, depend upon Northern enterprise and skill for their introduction to the public. Mr. DeBow, the eminent Statistician, publishes a Southern Review, purporting to be issued from New Orleans. It is printed and bound in the city of New York. We clip the following paragraph from a recent number of the Vicksburgh (Miss.)Whig:—
“Southern Enterprize.—Even the Mississippi Legislature, at its late session allowed its laws to go to Boston to be printed, and made an appropriation of $3,000 to pay one of its members to go there and read the proof sheets instead of having it done in the State, and thereby assisting in building up a Southern publishing house. What a commentary on the Yankee-haters!”
The Greensboro (N. C.)Patriotthus records a similar contribution, on the part of that State, to “the creation of a purely Southern Literature:”
“We have heard it said, that those who had the control of the printing of the revised Statutes of North Carolina, in order to save a few dimes, had the work executed in Boston, in preference to giving the job to a citizen of this State. We impugn not the motives of the agents in this matter; but it is a little humiliating that no work except the commonest labor, can be done in North Carolina; that everything which requires a little skill, capital, or ingenuity, must be sent North. In the case under consideration, we have heard it remarked, that when the whole bill of expenses connected with the printing of the Revised Statutes in Boston was footed up, it only amounted to a few thousand dollars more than the job would have cost in this State. But then we have the consolation of knowing that the bookcame from the North, and that it was printed among theabolitionistsof Boston; thepeculiar friendsof North Carolina and the South generally.—Of course we ought to be willing to pay a few extra thousands in consideration of these important facts!”
Southern divines give us elaborate “Bible Arguments;” Southern statists heap treatise upon treatise through which the Federal Constitution is tortured into all monstrous shapes; Southern novelists bore usad infinitumwith pictures of the beatitudes of plantation life and the negro-quarters; Southern verse-wrights drone out theirdrowsy dactyls or grow ventricous with their turgid heroics all in defence of slavery,—priest, politician, novelist, bardling, severally ringing the changes upon “the Biblical institution,” “the conservative institution,” “the humanizing institution,” “the patriarchal institution”—and then—have their books printed on Northern paper, with Northern types, by Northern artizans, stitched, bound and made ready for the market by Northern industry; and yet fail to see in all this, as a true philosophical mindmustsee, an overwhelming refutation of their miserable sophisms in behalf of a system against which humanity in all its impulses and aspirations, and civilization in all its activities and triumphs, utter their perpetual protest.
From a curious article in the “American Publishers Circular” on “Book Making in America,” we give the following extracts:
“It is somewhat alarming to know that the number of houses now actually engaged in the publishing of books, not including periodicals, amounts to more than three hundred. About three-fourths of these are engaged in Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—the balance being divided between Cincinnati, Buffalo, Auburn, Albany, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, and a few other places. There are more than three thousand booksellers who dispense the publications of these three hundred, besides six or seven thousand apothecaries, grocers, and hardware dealers, who connect literature with drugs, molasses, and nails.“The best printing in America is probably now done in Cambridge; the best cloth binding in Boston, and the best calf and morocco in New-York and Philadelphia. In these two latter styles we are, as yet, a long distance from Heyday, the pride of London. His finish is supreme. There is nothing between it and perfection.“Books have multiplied to such an extent in our country, thatit now takes 750 paper mills, with 2,000 engines in constant operation, to supply the printers, who work day and night, endeavoring to keep their engagements with publishers. These tireless mills produced 270,000,000 pounds of paper the past year, which immense supply has sold for about $27,000,000. A pound and a quarter of rags were required for a pound of paper, and 400,000,000 pounds were therefore consumed in this way last year. The cost of manufacturing a twelve months’ supply of paper for the United States, aside from labor and rags, is computed at $4,000,000. * * *“The Harper establishment, the largest of our publishing houses, covers half an acre of ground. If old Mr. Caxton, who printed those stories of the Trojan war so long ago, could follow the Ex-Mayor of New-York in one of his morning rounds in Franklin Square, he would be, to say the least, a little surprised. He would see in one room the floor loaded with the weight of 150 tons of presses. The electrotyping process would puzzle him somewhat; the drying and pressing process would startle him; the bustle would make his head ache; and the stock-room would quite finish him. An edition of Harpers’ Monthly Magazine alone consists of 175,000. Few persons have any idea how large a number this is as applied to the edition of a book. It is computed that if these magazines were to rain down, and one man should attempt to pick them up like chips, it would take him a fortnight to pick up the copies of one single number, supposing him to pick up one every second, and to work ten hours a day.”“The rapidity with which books are now manufactured is almost incredible. A complete copy of one of Bulwer’s novels, published across the water in three volumes, and reproduced here in one, was swept through the press in New-York in fifty hours, and offered for sale smoking hot in the streets. The fabulous edifice proposed by a Yankee from Vermont, no longer seems an impossibility. ‘Build the establishment according to my plan,’ said he; ‘drive a sheep in at one end, and he shall immediately come out at the other, four quarters of lamb, a felt hat, a leather apron, and a quarto Bible.’”
“It is somewhat alarming to know that the number of houses now actually engaged in the publishing of books, not including periodicals, amounts to more than three hundred. About three-fourths of these are engaged in Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—the balance being divided between Cincinnati, Buffalo, Auburn, Albany, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, and a few other places. There are more than three thousand booksellers who dispense the publications of these three hundred, besides six or seven thousand apothecaries, grocers, and hardware dealers, who connect literature with drugs, molasses, and nails.
“The best printing in America is probably now done in Cambridge; the best cloth binding in Boston, and the best calf and morocco in New-York and Philadelphia. In these two latter styles we are, as yet, a long distance from Heyday, the pride of London. His finish is supreme. There is nothing between it and perfection.
“Books have multiplied to such an extent in our country, thatit now takes 750 paper mills, with 2,000 engines in constant operation, to supply the printers, who work day and night, endeavoring to keep their engagements with publishers. These tireless mills produced 270,000,000 pounds of paper the past year, which immense supply has sold for about $27,000,000. A pound and a quarter of rags were required for a pound of paper, and 400,000,000 pounds were therefore consumed in this way last year. The cost of manufacturing a twelve months’ supply of paper for the United States, aside from labor and rags, is computed at $4,000,000. * * *
“The Harper establishment, the largest of our publishing houses, covers half an acre of ground. If old Mr. Caxton, who printed those stories of the Trojan war so long ago, could follow the Ex-Mayor of New-York in one of his morning rounds in Franklin Square, he would be, to say the least, a little surprised. He would see in one room the floor loaded with the weight of 150 tons of presses. The electrotyping process would puzzle him somewhat; the drying and pressing process would startle him; the bustle would make his head ache; and the stock-room would quite finish him. An edition of Harpers’ Monthly Magazine alone consists of 175,000. Few persons have any idea how large a number this is as applied to the edition of a book. It is computed that if these magazines were to rain down, and one man should attempt to pick them up like chips, it would take him a fortnight to pick up the copies of one single number, supposing him to pick up one every second, and to work ten hours a day.”
“The rapidity with which books are now manufactured is almost incredible. A complete copy of one of Bulwer’s novels, published across the water in three volumes, and reproduced here in one, was swept through the press in New-York in fifty hours, and offered for sale smoking hot in the streets. The fabulous edifice proposed by a Yankee from Vermont, no longer seems an impossibility. ‘Build the establishment according to my plan,’ said he; ‘drive a sheep in at one end, and he shall immediately come out at the other, four quarters of lamb, a felt hat, a leather apron, and a quarto Bible.’”
The business of the Messrs. Harper, whose establishment is referred to in the foregoing extract, is probably more generally diffused over every section of this country than that of any other publishing house. From enquiries recently made of them we learn that they issue, on an average, 3,000 bound volumes per day, throughout the year, and that each volume will average 500 pages—making a total of about one million of volumes, and not less than five hundred millions of pages per annum. This does not include the Magazine and books in pamphlet form, each of which contains as much matter as a bound volume.—Their bills for paper exceed $300,000 annually, and as the average cost is fifteen cents per pound, they consume more than two millions of pounds—say one thousand tons of white paper.
There are regularly employed in their own premises about 550 persons, including printers, binders, engravers, and clerks. These are all paid in full once a fortnight in bankable money. Besides these, there are numerous authors and artists in every section of the country, who furnish manuscripts and illustrations, on terms generally satisfactory to all the parties interested.
The Magazine has a monthly circulation of between 115,000 and 200,000, or about two millions of copies annually. Each number of the Magazine is closed up about the fifth of the month previous to its date. Three or four days thereafter the mailing begins, commencing with more distant subscribers, all of whom are supplied before any copies are sold for delivery in New-York. The intention of the publishers is, that it shall be delivered as nearlyas possible on the same day in St. Louis, New-Orleans, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Boston, and New-York. It takes from ten to twelve days to dispatch the whole edition, (which weighs between four and five tons,) by mail and express.
Their new periodical, “Harpers’ Weekly,” has, in a little more than four months, reached a sale of nearly 70,000 copies. The mailing of this commences on Tuesday night, and occupies about three days.
Ex-Mayor Harper, whom we have found to be one of the most affable and estimable gentlemen in the city of New-York, informed us, sometime ago, that, though he had no means of knowing positively, he was of the opinion that about eighty per cent. of all their publications find final purchasers in the free States—the remainder, about twenty per cent., in the slave States. Yet it is probable that, with one or two exceptions, no other publishing house in the country has so large a per centage of Southern trade.
Of the “more than three hundred houses engaged in the publication of books,” to which the writer in the “American Publishers’ Circular” refers, upwards of nine-tenths of the number are in the non-slaveholding States, and these represent not less than ninety-nine hundredths of the whole capital invested in the business. Baltimore has twice as many publishers as any other Southern city; and nearly as many as the whole South beside. The census returns of 1850 give but twenty-four publishers for the entire South, and ten of these were in Maryland. The relative disproportion which then existed in this branch of enterprise, between the North and the South, stillexists; or, if it has been changed at all, that change is in favor of the North. So of all the capital, enterprise and industry involved in the manufacture of thematerialthat enters into the composition of books. All the paper manufactories of the South do not produce enough to supply a single publishing house in the city of New-York.—Perhaps “a Southern Literature” does not necessarily involve the enterprises requisite to themanufactureof books; but experience has shown that there is a somewhat intimate relation between the author, printer, paper-maker and publisher; in other words, that the intellectual activity which expresses itself in books, is measurable by the mechanical activities engaged in their manufacture.—Thus a State that is fruitful in authors will almost necessarily be fruitful in publishers; and the number of both classes will be proportioned to thereadingpopulation. The poverty of Southern literature is legitimately shown, therefore, in the paucity of Southern publishers. We do not deny a high degree of cultivated talent to the South; we are familiar with the names of her sons whose genius has made them eminent; all that we insist upon is, that the same accursed influence which has smitten her industrial enterprises with paralysis, and retarded indefinitely her material advancement, has exerted a corresponding influence upon her literature. How it has done this we shall more fully indicate before we close the chapter.
At the “Southern Convention” held some months since at Savannah, a good deal was said about “Southern literature,” and many suggestions made in reference to the best means for its promotion. One speaker thought that“they could get text-books at home without going to either Old England or New England for them.” Well—they can try. The effort will not harm them; nor the North either. The orator was confident “that the South had talent enough to do anything that needs to be done, and independence enough to do it.” Thetalentwe shall not deny; theindependencewe are ready to believe in when we see it. When she throws off the incubus of slavery under which she goes staggering like the Sailor of Bagdad under the weight of the Old Man of the Sea, she will prove her independence, and demonstrate her ability “to do anything that needs to be done.” Till then she is but a fettered giant, whose vitals are torn by the dogs which her own folly has engendered.
Another speaker, on the occasion referred to, half-unconsciously it would seem, threw a gleam of light upon the subject under discussion, which, had not himself and his hearers been bat-blind, would have revealed the clue that conducts from the darkness in which they burrow to the day of redemption for the South. Said he:—
“Northern publishers employ the talent of the South and of the whole country to write for them, and pour out thousands annually for it; but Southern men expect to get talent without paying for it. TheSouthern Quarterly Reviewand theLiterary Messengerare literally struggling for existence, for want of material aid. * * * It is not the South that builds up Northern literature—they do it themselves. There is talent and mind and poetic genius enough in the South to build up a literature of a high order; but Southern publishers cannot get money enough to assist them in their enterprises, and, therefore, the South has no literature.
Here are truths. “Southern men expect to get talent without paying for it.” A very natural expectation, considering that they have been accustomed to have all their material wants supplied by the uncompensated toil of their slaves. In this instance it may seem an absurd one, but it results legitimately from the system of slavery. That system, in fact, operates in a two-fold way against the Southern publisher: first, by its practical repudiation of the scriptural axiom that the laborer is worthy of his hire; and secondly, by restricting the circle of readers through the ignorance which it inevitably engenders. How is it that the people of the North build up their literature?—Two words reveal the secret:intelligence—compensation. They area reading people—the poorest artizan or day-laborer has his shelf of books, or his daily or weekly paper, whose contents he seldom fails to master before retiring at night; andthey are accustomed to pay for all the books and papers which they peruse. Readers and payers—these are the men who insure the prosperity of publishers. Where a system of enforced servitude prevails, it is very apt to beget loose notions about the obligation of paying for anything; and many minds fail to see the distinction, morally, between compelling Sambo to pick cotton without paying him wages, or compelling Lippincott & Co. to manufacture books for the planter’s pleasure or edification upon the same liberal terms. But more than this—where a system of enforced servitude prevails, a fearful degree of ignorance prevails also, as its necessary accompaniment. The enslaved masses are, of course, thrust back from the fountains of knowledge by the strong arm of law, while the poornon-slaveholding classes are almost as effectually excluded from the institutions of learning by their poverty—the sparse population of slaveholding districts being unfavorable to the maintenance of free schools, and the exigencies of their condition forbidding them to avail themselves of any more costly educational privileges.
Northern publishers can “employ the talent of the South and of the whole country to write for them, and pour out thousands annually for it,” simply because areadingpopulation, accustomed topayfor the service which it receives, enables them to do so. A similar population at the South would enable Southern publishers to do the same. Substitute free labor for slave labor, the institutions of freedom for those of slavery, and it would not long remain true that “Southern publishers cannot get money enough to assist them in their enterprises, and therefore the South has no literature.” This is the discovery which the South Carolina orator from whom we quote, but narrowly escaped making, when he stood upon its very edge, and rounded his periods with the truths in whose unapprehended meanings was hidden this germ of redemption for a nation.
The self-stultification of folly, however, was never more evident than it is in the current gabble of the oligarchs about a “Southern literature.” They do not mean by it a healthy, manly, normal utterance of unfettered minds, without which there can be no proper literature; but an emasculated substitute therefor, from which the element of freedom is eliminated; husks, from which the kernel has escaped—a body, from which the vitalizing spirit has fled—a literature which ignores manhood by confoundingit with brutehood; or, at best, deals with all similes of freedom as treason against the “peculiar institution.” There is not a single great name in the literary annals of the old or new world that coulddwarfitself to the stature requisite to gain admission into the Pantheon erected by these devotees of the Inane for their Lilliputian deities. Thank God, a “Southern literature,” in the sense intended by the champions of slavery, is a simple impossibility, rendered such by that exility of mind which they demand in its producers as a prerequisite to admission into the guild of Southern authorship. The tenuous thoughts of such authorlings could not survive a single breath of manly criticism. The history of the rise, progress, and decline of their literature could be easily written on a child’s smooth palm, and leave space enough for its funeral oration and epitaph. The latter might appropriately be that which, in one of our rural districts, marks the grave of a still-born infant:—
“If so early I am done for,I wonder what I was begun for!”
We desire to see the South bear its just proportion in the literary activities and achievements of our common country. It has never yet done so, and it never will until its own manhood is vindicated in the abolition of slavery. The impulse which such a measure would give to all industrial pursuits that deal with the elements of material prosperity, would be imparted also to the no less valuable but more intangible creations of the mind. Take from the intellect of the South the incubus which now oppresses it, and its rebound would be glorious; the era of its divinerinspirations would begin; and its triumphs would be a perpetual vindication of the superiority of free institutions over those of slavery.
To Duyckinck’s “Cyclopedia of American Literature”—a sort ofOmnium-gatherumthat reminds one of Jeremiah’s figs—we are indebted for the following facts: The whole number of “American authors” whose place of nativity is given, is five hundred and sixty-nine. Of these seventy-nine were foreign born, eighty-seven were natives of the South, and four hundred and three—a vast majority of the whole, first breathed the vital air in the free North. Many of those who were born in the South, received their education in the North, quite a number of whom became permanent residents thereof. Still, for the purposes of this computation, we count them on the side of the South. Yet how significant the comparison which this computation furnishes! Throwing the foreign born (adopted citizens, mostly residents of the North) out of the reckoning, and the record stands,—Northern authorsfour hundred and three; Southern,eighty-seven—a difference of three hundred and sixteen in favor of the North! And this, probably, indicates very fairly the relative intellectual activity of the two sections.
We accept the facts gleaned from Duyckinck’s work as a basis, simply, of our estimate: not as being absolutely accurate in themselves, though they are doubtless reliable in the main, and certainly as fair for the South as they are for the North. We might dissent from the judgment of the compiler in reference to the propriety of applying the term “literature” to much that his compilationcontains; but as tastes have proverbially differed from the days of the venerable dame who kissed her cow—not to extend our researches into the condition of things anterior to that interesting event—we will not insist uponourview of the matter, but take it for granted that he has disentombed from forgotten reviews, newspapers, pamphlets, and posters, a fair relative proportion of “authors” for both North and South, for which “American Literature” is unquestionably under infinite obligations to him!
Griswold’s “Poets and Poetry of America” and Thomas Buchanan Read’s “Female Poets of America” furnish evidence, equally conclusive, of the benumbing influence of slavery upon the intellect of a country. Of course, these compilers say nothing about Slavery, and probably never thought of it in connection with their respective works, but none the less significant on that account is the testimony of thefactswhich they give. From the last edition of Griswold’s compilation, (which contains the names of none of our female writers, he having included them in a separate volume) we find the names of one hundred and forty-one writers of verse: of theseonewas foreign-born,seventeennatives of the slaveholding, andone hundred and twenty-threeof the non-slaveholding States. Of our female poets, whose nativity is given by Mr. Read,elevenare natives of the South; andseventy-threeof the North! These simple arithmetical figures are God’s eternal Scripture against the folly and madness of Slavery, and need no aid of rhetoric to give emphasis to the startling eloquence of their revelations.
But, after all, literature is not to be estimated by cubicfeet or pounds averdupois, nor measured by the bushel or the yardstick. Quality, rather than quantity, is the true standard of estimation. The fact, however, matters little for our present purpose; for the South, we are sorry to say, is as much behind the North in the former as in the latter. We do not forget the names of Gayarre, Benton, Simms, and other eminent citizens of the Slave States, who have by their contributions to American letters conferred honor upon themselves and upon our common country, when we affirm, that those among our authors who enjoy a cosmopolitan reputation, are, with a few honorable exceptions, natives of the Free North; and that the names which most brilliantly illustrate our literature, in its every department, are those which have grown into greatness under the nurturing influence of free institutions. “Comparisons are odious,” it is said; and we will not, unnecessarily, render them more so, in the present instance, by contrasting, name by name, the literary men of the South with the literary men of the North. We do not depreciate the former, nor overestimate the latter. But let us ask, whence come our geographers, our astronomers, our chemists, our meteorologists, our ethnologists, and others, who have made their names illustrious in the domain of the Natural Sciences? Not from the Slave States, certainly. In the Literature of Law, the South can furnish no name that can claim peership with those of Story and of Kent; in History, none that tower up to the altitude of Bancroft, Prescott, Hildreth, Motley and Washington Irving; in Theology, none that can challenge favorable comparison with those of Edwards, Dwight,Channing, Taylor, Bushnell, Tyler and Wayland in Fiction, none that take rank with Cooper, and Mrs. Stowe; and but few that may do so with even the second class novelists of the North;[9]in Poetry, none that can command position with Bryant, Halleck, and Percival, with Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell, with Willis, Stoddard and Taylor, with Holmes, Saxe, and Burleigh; and—we might add twenty other Northern names before we found their Southern peer, with the exception of poor Poe, who, within a narrow range of subjects, showed himself a poet of consummate art, and occupies a sort of debatable ground between our first and second-class writers.
We might extend this comparison to our writers in every department of letters, from the compiler of school-books to the author of the most profound ethical treatise, and with precisely the same result. But we forbear. The task is distasteful to our State pride, and would have been entirely avoided had not a higher principle urged us to its performance. It remains for us now to enquire,
What has produced this literary pauperism of the South? One single word, most pregnant in its terrible meanings, answers the question. That word is—Slavery! But we have been so long accustomed to the ugly thing itself, and have become so familiar with its no less ugly fruits, that the common mind fails to apprehend the connection between the one, as cause, and the other as effect; andit therefore becomes necessary to give a more detailed answer to our interrogatory.
Obviously, then, the conditions requisite to a flourishing literature are wanting at the South. These are—
I. Readers. The people of the South are not a reading people. Many of the adult population never learned to read; still more, do not care to read. We have been impressed, during a temporary sojourn in the North, with the difference between the middle and laboring classes in the Free States, and the same classes in the Slave States, in this respect. Passing along the great routes of travel in the former, or taking our seat in the comfortable cars that pass up and down the avenues of our great commercial metropolis, we have not failed to contrast the employment of our fellow-passengers with that which occupies the attention of the corresponding classes on our various Southern routes of travel. In the one case, a large proportion of the passengers seem intent upon mastering the contents of the newspaper, or some recently published book. The merchant, the mechanic, the artizan, the professional man, and even the common laborer, going to or returning from their daily avocations, are busy with their morning or evening paper, or engaged in an intelligent discussion of some topic of public interest. This is their leisure hour, and it is given to the acquisition of such information as may be of immediate or ultimate use, or to the cultivation of a taste for elegant literature. In the other case, newspapers and books seem generally ignored, and noisy discussions of village and State politics, the tobacco and cotton crops, filibusterism in Cuba, Nicaragua,or Sonora, the price of negroes generally, and especially of “fine-looking wenches,” the beauties of lynch-law, the delights of horse-racing, the excitement of street fights with bowie-knives and revolvers, the “manifest destiny” theory that justifies the stealing of all territory contiguous to our own, and kindred topics, constitute the warp and woof of conversation. All this is on a level with the general intelligence of the Slave States. It is true, these States have their educated men,—the majority of whom owe their literary culture to the colleges of the North. Not that there are no Southern colleges—for there are institutions, so called, in a majority of the Slave States.—Some of them, too, are not deficient in the appointments requisite to our higher educational institutions; but as a general thing, Southern colleges are colleges only inname, and will scarcely take rank with a third-rate Northern academy, while our academies, with a few exceptions, are immeasurably inferior to the public schools of New-York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The truth is, there is a vast inert mass of stupidity and ignorance, too dense for individual effort to enlighten or remove, in all communities cursed with the institution of slavery. Disguise the unwelcome truth as we may, slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and of vices, and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture. The masses, if they think of literature at all, think of it only as a costly luxury, to be monopolized by the few.
The proportion of white adults over twenty years of age,in each State, who cannot read and write, to thewholewhite population, is as follows:
In this table, Illinois and Indiana are the only Free States which, in point of education, are surpassed by any of the Slave States; and this disgraceful fact is owing, principally, to the influx of foreigners, and to immigrants from the Slave States. New-York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania have also a large foreign element in their population, that swells very considerably this percentage of ignorance. For instance, New-York shows, by the last census, a population of 98,722 who cannot read and write, and of this number 68,052 are foreigners; Rhode Island, 3,607, of whom 2,359 are foreigners; Pennsylvania, 76,272, of whom 24,989 are foreigners. On the other hand, the ignorance of the Slave States is principallynativeignorance, but comparatively few emigrants from Europe seeking a home upon a soil cursed with “the peculiar institution.” North Carolina has a foreignpopulation of only 340, South Carolina only 104, Arkansas only 27, Tennessee only 505, and Virginia only 1,137, who cannot read and write; while the aggregate ofnativeignorance in these five States (exclusive of theslaves, who are debarred all education bylaw) is 278,948! No longer ago than 1837, Governor Clarke, of Kentucky, in his message to the Legislature of that State, declared that “by the computation of those most familiar with the subject,one-third of the adult population of the State are unable to write their names;” and Governor Campbell, of Virginia, reported to the Legislature, that “from the returns of ninety-eight clerks, it appeared that of 4,614 applications for marriage licenses in 1837, no less than 1,047 were made by men unable to write.”
In the Slave States the proportion of free white children between the ages of five and twenty, who are found at any school or college, is not quiteone-fifthof the whole; in the Free States, the proportion is more thanthree-fifths.
We could fill our pages with facts like these to an almost indefinite extent, but it cannot be necessary. No truth is more demonstrable, nay, no truth has been more abundantly demonstrated, than this: that Slavery is hostile to general education; its strength, its very life, is in the ignorance and stolidity of the masses; it naturally and necessarily represses general literary culture. To talk, therefore, of the “creation of a purely Southern Literature,” withoutreadersto demand, orwritersto produce it, is the mere babble of idiocy.
II. Another thing essential to the creation of a literature isMental Freedom. How much ofthatis to be foundin the region of Slavery? We will not say that there isnone; but if it exists, it exists as the outlawed antagonist of human chattelhood. He who believes that the despotism of the accursed institution expends its malignant forces upon theslave, leaving intact the white and (so called) free population, is the victim of a most monstrous delusion. One end of the yoke that bows the African to the dust, presses heavily upon the neck of his Anglo-Saxon master. The entire mind of the South either stultifies itself into acquiescence with Slavery, succumbs to its authority, or chafes in indignant protest against its monstrous pretensions and outrageous usurpations. A free press is an institution almost unknown at the South. Free speech is considered as treason against slavery: and when people dare neither speak nor print their thoughts, free thought itself is well nigh extinguished. All that can be said indefenceof human bondage, may be spoken freely; but question either its morality or its policy, and the terrors of lynch law are at once invoked to put down the pestilent heresy. The legislation of the Slave States for the suppression of the freedom of speech and the press, is disgraceful and cowardly to the last degree, and can find its parallel only in the meanest and bloodiest despotisms of the Old World. No institution that could bear the light would thus sneakingly seek to burrow itself in utter darkness. Look, too, at the mobbings, lynchings, robberies, social and political proscriptions, and all manner of nameless outrages, to which men in the South have been subjected, simply upon the suspicion that they were the enemies of Slavery. We could fill pageafter page of this volume with the record of such atrocities. But a simple reference to them is enough. Our countrymen have not yet forgotten why John C. Underwood was, but a few months since, banished from his home in Virginia, and the accomplished Hedreck driven from his College professorship in North Carolina. They believed Slavery inimical to the best interest of the South, and for daring to give expression to this belief in moderate yet manly language, they were ostracised by the despotic Slave Power, and compelled to seek a refuge from its vengeance in States where the principles of freedom are better understood. Pending the last Presidential election, there were thousands, nay, tens of thousands of voters in the Slave States, who desired to give their suffrages for the Republican nominee, John C. Fremont, himself a Southron, but a non-slaveholder. The Constitution of the United States guaranteed to these men an expression of their preference at the ballot-box. But were they permitted such an expression? Not at all. They were denounced, threatened, overawed, by the Slave Power—and it is not too much to say that there was really noConstitutional election,—that is, no such free expression of political preferences as the Constitution aims to secure—in a majority of the Slave States.
From a multiplicity of facts like these, the inference is unavoidable, that Slavery tolerates no freedom of the press—no freedom of speech—no freedom of opinion. To expect that a whole-souled, manly literature can flourish under such conditions, is as absurd as it would be to look for health amid the pestilential vapors of a dungeon, orfor the continuance of animal life without the aid of oxygen.
III. Mental activity—force—enterprise—are requisite to the creation of literature. Slavery tends to sluggishness—imbecility—inertia. Where free thought is treason, the masses will not long take the trouble of thinking at all. Desuetude begets incompetence—thedare-notsoon becomes thecannot. The mind thus enslaved, necessarily loses its interest in the processes of other minds; and its tendency is to sink down into absolute stolidity or sottishness. Our remarks find melancholy confirmation in the abject servilism in which multitudes of the non-slaveholding whites of the South are involved. In them, ambition, pride, self-respect, hope, seem alike extinct. Their slaveholding fellows are, in some respects, in a still more unhappy condition—helpless, nerveless, ignorant, selfish; yet vain-glorious, self-sufficient and brutal. Are these the chosen architects who are expected to build up “a purely Southern literature?”
The truth is, slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom—it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of Republicanism—it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters. Than the better class of Southern authors themselves, none will feel more keenly the truth of our remarks. They write books, but can find for them neither publishers nor remunerative sales at the South. The executors of Calhoun seek, for his works, aNorthern publisher. Benton writes history and prepares voluminous compilations, which are given to the world through a Northern publisher. Simms writes novels and poems, and they are scattered abroad from the presses of a Northern publisher. Eighty per cent. of all the copies sold are probably bought by Northern readers.
When will Southern authors understand their own interests? When will the South, as a whole, abandoning its present suicidal policy, enter upon that career of prosperity, greatness, and true renown, to which God by his word and his providences, is calling it? “If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger and speaking vanity; and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity and thy darkness be as the noonday: And the Lord shall guide thee continually and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones; and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.”
Our limits, not our materials, are exhausted. We would gladly say more, but can only, in conclusion, add as the result of our investigations in this department of our subject, thatLiterature and Liberty are inseparable; the one can never have a vigorous existence without being wedded to the other.
Our work is done. It is the voice of the non-slaveholding whites of the South, through one identified with them by interest, by feeling, by position. That voice, by whomsoever spoken, must yet be heard and heeded. The time hastens—the doom of slavery is written—the redemption of the South draws nigh.
In taking leave of our readers, we know not how we can give more forcible expression to our thoughts and intentions than by saying that, in concert with the intelligent free voters of the North, we, the non-slaveholding whites of the South, expect to elevateJohn C. Fremont,Cassius M. Clay,James G. Birney, or some other Southern non-slaveholder, to the Presidency in 1860; and that the patriot thus elevated to that dignified station will, through our cordial co-operation, be succeeded byWilliam H. Seward,Charles Sumner,John McLean, or some other non-slaveholder of the North;—and furthermore, that if, in these or in any other similar cases, the oligarchs do not quietly submit to the will of a constitutional majority of the people, as expressed at the ballot-box, the first battle between freedom and slavery will be fought at home—and may God defend the right!
THE END.