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312 were other influences at work to excite sectional feelings and beget just indignation among the Southern people. The North was commercial, the South agricultural. Through their fast-sailing packets and steamers Northern people were in constant communication with foreign nations; the South rarely except through the North, Northern men, and Northern societies. This gave the North the ear of Europe. She took advantage of this circumstance to our prejudice—defamed the South and abused the European mind with libels and slanders and evil reports against us. They represented Southern people as a lawless and violent set, where men and women were without shame; they asserted, with all the effrontery of impudent falsehood, that the chief occupation of the gentlemen of Virginia was the breeding of slaves like cattle for the shambles. To this day the whole South is suffering under this defamation of character; for it is well known that in consequence of this immigrants from Europe now refuse to come and settle in Virginia.

This long list of grievances does not end here. The population of the North had, by reason of the vast numbers of foreigners that had been induced to settle there, become so great that the balance of power in Congress was completely destroyed.

The Northern people became more tyrannical in their disposition, Congress more aggressive in its policy. In every branch of the Government the South was in a hopeless minority, and completely at the mercy of an unscrupulous majority for their rights in the Union. Emboldened by their popular majorities at the hustings, the master-spirits of the North now proclaimed the approach of an irrepressible conflict with the South, and their representative men in Congress preached the doctrine of a "higher law," confessing that the policy about to be pursued in relation to Southern affairs was dictated by a rule of conduct unknown to the Constitution, not contained in the Bible, but sanctioned, as they said, by some higher law than the Bible itself. Thus, finding ourselves at the mercy of faction and fanaticism, the Presidential election of 1860 drew nigh. The time for putting candidates in the field was at hand. The North brought out their candidate, and by their platform pledged him to acts of unfriendly legislation against us. The South warned the North and protested, the political leaders in some of the Southern States publicly declaring that if Mr. Lincoln,