The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 | Page 5

is a spirit that is cultivated assiduously from childhood to youth, and from youth to full age, by constant and ubiquitous subjection of the negro, young and old, to the petty tyranny, the whims and caprices of little master and miss, and by the exercise of authority at all times and in all places by the white over the black race. It is a spirit that is essential to the slave driver; and when the habit of dictation and command to inferiors has grown into every fibre of his nature, he cannot dismiss it when he deals with his equals, whenever his wishes are opposed. Hence the violence, the lawlessness, the carrying and free use of deadly weapons, the duels and murders that are so rife in the South, and the haughty manners of so many Southern Congressmen. The rebellion is simply the culmination and breaking forth of this arrogant, domineering, slavery-fostered spirit on a vast scale. Failing to hold the reins of the National Government, it must needs destroy it.
Such a temper and disposition is evidently incompatible with human equality and equal rights; and in it we have one of the roots of Southern ill-concealed antagonism to free republican government.
2d. The second Southern, or slavery-engendered element that is antagonistic to free institutions, is contempt of labor.
Could anything else be expected? Because slaves work, and are compelled to it by the overseer's lash, all labor necessarily partakes of the disgrace which is thus attached to it. It is surprising how perverted the Southern mind is upon this point. Because slavery degrades labor, they maintain that the converse must also be true, viz., that all who labor must unavoidably possess the spirit of slaves; and hence they supposed that the North would not make a vigorous opposition, because all Northerners are addicted to labor.
The truth however is this: Where labor is despised no community can flourish as it is capable of doing; much less one with free institutions. We might just as well talk of a body without flesh and bones; of a house without walls or timbers; of a country without land and water, as of free institutions without skilled and honorable labor. It is the very ground on which they stand.
This then is another source of antagonism between slave and free institutions.
3d. A third point, not only of difference, but also of antagonism between slave society and free, consists in the permanent contraction or limitation of the field of labor in the former, and its perpetual expansion and multiplication of the branches of industry in the latter. Not only does the slave perform as little work as he can with safety, but besides this, the sphere in which slave labor can be profitably employed is a limited one. Agriculture on an extensive scale, on large plantations, is the only one that the slaveholder finds to repay him. All articles, or the vast majority of them, used by the South, that require for their production a great number of different and subdivided branches of labor, come from the North.
We have said that labor, skilled, honored, educated labor, is the material foundation, the solid ground upon which free institutions rest. We now further add this undeniable and important truth, viz., that as branches of labor are multiplied; as each branch itself is subdivided and diversified; as new branches and new details are established by the aid of the ever-increasing light of scientific discovery, and the exhaustless fertility of human inventive genius; as all these numerous industries are more or less connected and interlocked; as this great network of ever-multiplying and diversified human labors expands its circumference, while also filling up its interior meshes, in the degree that all this takes place, the broader and firmer becomes this industrial foundation for free institutions.
It is on this broad platform of diversified and interlocked labors that man meets his brother man and equal. The variety and diversity of labors adapts itself to a like and analogous diversity of human characters, tastes, and industrial aptitudes and capacities. And the mutual dependence and interlocking of these multiplied branches of industry bring the laborers themselves into more numerous, more close, and independent relations. Men are first drawn together by their mutual wants and their social impulses; but when thus brought together, they tend to remain united, not merely by affinity of character, but also, and often mainly by their having something to do in common--by their common labors and pursuits. Advancing civilization, since it ever brings out and develops more and more of man's nature, must, as a natural result, ever also multiply his wants. These multiplying wants can be satisfied for each individual only by the diversified activities of multitudes of his fellows; the results of whose united labors, brought to his door, are seen in