"The State of South Carolina"

April 30, 1861

There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees. That hatred has been swelling for years, till it is the very life-blood of the State. It has set South Carolina to work steadily to organize her resources for the struggle which she intended to provoke, if it did not come in the course of time. “Incompatibility of temper” would have been sufficient ground for the divorce, and I am satisfied that there has been a deep-rooted design, conceived in some men’s minds thirty years ago, and extended gradually year after year to others, to break away from the Union at the very first opportunity. The North is to South Carolina a corrupt and evil thing, to which for long years she has been bound by burning chains, while monopolists and manufacturers fed on her tender limbs. She has been bound in a Maxentian union to the object she loathes. New England is to her the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption. It is the source of everything which South Carolina hates, and of the torrents of free thought and taxed manufactures, of Abolitionism and of fillibustering, which have flooded the land. Believe a Southern man as he believes himself, and you must regard New England and the kindred States as the birthplace of impurity of mind among men and of unchastity in women—the home of Free Love, of Fourierism, of Infidelity, of Abolitionism, of false teachings in political economy and in social life; a land saturated with the drippings of rotten philosophy, with the poisonous infections of a fanatic press; without honor or modesty; whose wisdom is paltry cunning, whose valor and manhood have been swallowed up in a corrupt, howling demagogy, and in the marts of a dishonest commerce. It is the merchants of New York who fit out ships for the slave-trade, and carry it on in Yankee ships. It is the capital of the North which supports, and it is Northern men who concoct and execute, the fillibustering expeditions which have brought discredit on the Slave-holding States. In the large cities people are corrupted by itinerant and ignorant lecturers—in the towns and in the country by an unprincipled press. The populations, indeed, know how to read and write, but they don’t know how to think, and they are the easy victims of the wretched impostors on all the ’ologies and ’isms who swarm over the region, and subsist by lecturing on subjects which the innate vices of mankind induce them to accept with eagerness, while they assume the garb of philosophical abstractions to cover their nastiness in deference to a contemptible and universal hypocrisy....

Assuredly the New England demon who has been persecuting the South until its intolerable cruelty and insolence forced her, in a spasm of agony, to rend her chains asunder. The New Englander must have something to persecute, and as he has hunted down all his Indians, burnt all his witches, and persecuted all his opponents to the death, he invented Abolitionism as the sole resource left to him for the gratification of his favorite passion. Next to this motive principle is his desire to make money dishonestly, trickily, meanly, and shabbily. He has acted on it in all his relations with the South, and has cheated and plundered her in all his dealings by villainous tariffs. If one objects that the South must have been a party to this, because her boast is that her statesmen have ruled the Government of the country, you are told that the South yielded out of pure good nature. Now, however, she will have free trade, and will open the coasting trade to foreign nations, and shut out from it the hated Yankees, who so long monopolized and made their fortunes by it. Under all the varied burdens and miseries to which she was subjected, the South held fast to her sheet anchor. South Carolina was the mooring ground in which it found the surest hold. The doctrine of State Rights was her salvation, and the fiercer the storm raged against her—the more stoutly demagogy, immigrant preponderance, and the blasts of universal suffrage bore down on her, threatening to sweep away the vested interests of the South in her right to govern the States—the greater was her confidence and the more resolutely she held on her cable. The North attracted “hordes of ignorant Germans and Irish,” and the scum of Europe, while the South repelled them. The industry, the capital of the North increased with enormous rapidity, under the influence of cheap labor and manufacturing ingenuity and enterprise, in the villages which swelled into towns, and the towns which became cities, under the unenvious eye of the South. She, on the contrary, toiled on slowly, clearing forests and draining swamps to find new cotton-grounds and rice-fields, for the employment of her only industry and for the development of her only capital—“involuntary labor.” The tide of immigration waxed stronger, and by degrees she saw the districts into which she claimed the right to introduce that capital closed against her, and occupied by free labor. The doctrine of squatter “sovereignty,” and the force of hostile tariffs, which placed a heavy duty on the very articles which the South most required, completed the measure of injuries to which she was subjected, and the spirit of discontent found vent in fiery debate, in personal insults, and in acrimonious speaking and writing, which increased in intensity in proportion as the Abolition movement, and the contest between the Federal principle and State Rights, became more vehement. I am desirous of showing in a few words, for the information of English readers, how it is that the Confederacy which Europe knew simply as a political entity has succeeded in dividing itself. The Slave States held the doctrine, or say they did, that each State was independent as France or as England, but that for certain purposes they chose a common agent to deal with foreign nations, and to impose taxes for the purpose of paying the expenses of the agency. We, it appears, talked of American citizens when there were no such beings at all. There were, indeed, citizens of the Sovereign State of South Carolina, or of Georgia or Florida, who permitted themselves to pass under that designation, but it was merely as a matter of personal convenience. It will be difficult for Europeans to understand this doctrine, as nothing like it has been heard before, and no such Confederation of Sovereign States has ever existed in any country in the world. The Northern men deny that it existed here, and claim for the Federal Government powers not compatible with such assumptions. They have lived for the Union, they served it, they labored for and made money by it. A man as a New York man was nothing—as an American citizen he was a great deal. A South Carolinian objected to lose his identity in any description which included him and a “Yankee clockmaker” in the same category.

Review

1. According to Russell, what are the reasons why South Carolinians hate New Englanders?
2. Consider events in recent American history. Do you agree with Russell when he writes "We [Europeans], it appears, talked of American citizens when there were no such beings at all"?
3. Are Russel's observations in 1861 still relevant today?