Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/324

298 a small oligarchy, such as the slaveholders constituted, is in the ascendant and is the political power, a strong journalistic spirit cannot be developed. Had there been men in the South of the temper of old Ben Harris, or Zenger, or Sam Adams, there would have been a different story to tell. The slave-holders of the South were never so numerically strong that they could not have been crushed by the South itself.

By appealing to the other white inhabitants on the ground of fear and race prejudice, however, they succeeded in crushing out whatever minority there might have been. What was more important, they drove to the North the very men that they needed, men of independent judgment, of the type of Edward Coles, second Governor of Illinois,—a slave-holder in Virginia who left that state in order that he might liberate his slaves.

More important still, they discouraged those restless spirits who sought better conditions in life, and who, as emigrants, took into undeveloped territory a vigor and a freshness that made for liberty of discussion and democracy, the very life of Americanism.

This side of the Southern question still remains to be explained—preferably, one would think, by a student of Southern sympathies, broad enough to understand that the sentiment in the North was an inevitable political-sociological development. That the sentiment in the South was also inevitable, one is forced to believe when one finds such exponents of it as Governor Henry A. Wise, who declared that he was thankful there were few papers in Virginia,—almost a paraphrase of the statement of Governor Berkeley of Virginia in 1671, when he thanked God that "we have no free schools nor printing,—God keep us from both."