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Those not already aware of it, will be surprised to learn that there are teachers in the South—high in position—but, as we think, very ignorant of our history—who accept the Northern theory that "slavery was the cause of the war," and must accept the dishonoring consequence that its preservation was our sole object in that struggle—the favorite position of the Northern advocates and the last support of their cause. This position they take in spite of the fact that the quarrel between the North and the South began when slavery existed in all the States. That writers or readers should ignore the proofs of this is surprising. We cite, for instance, Washington's stern order issued to the army before Boston in 1775, promising summary punishment to any man who should say or do anything to aggravate what he calls "the existing sectional feeling." For that feeling in that day we cannot find cause in slavery, for the good people of New England shared our Southern guiltiness. Nor is it to be explained except as springing from the old jealousy of Puritan and Cavalier, and the resentment of the Virginians against the New Englanders for failing to help them in the Indian war; whence, according to some authorities, the epithet, "Yankee" sprang.

At a later day (in 1786) Mr. Jay recommended to Congress that in exchange for a favorable commercial treaty with Spain we should yield to her condition that "no American vessel should navigate the Mississippi below the mouth of the Yazoo," New England—caring nothing for the distant Mississippi—supported this narrow and selfish policy; exciting, say contemporary writers, "the fierce indignation of the South, and especially of Virginia, to which State Kentucky then belonged." We quote in substance from Mr. Fiske's "Critical Period of American History." He recites the fact, but sees no connection between the incident and sectional war.

So of New England's pursuit of separate interests in 1812, the tariff iniquity of 1828, and the nullification struggle; all of which