Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/328

302 in statism, in law, in theology, in medicine, in the belles-lettres, is laid under contribution by the journals of the non-slave-holding states." Certainly, the same could not be said of the southern journals.

It was stated in 1850, undoubtedly with truth, that the press of the South, taken as a whole, was about twenty years behind that of the North, and that, while it was exceptional at the North to find a newspaper or magazine that had not improved during the decade from 1840 to 1850, in the South the reverse held true.

This book. Helper's Impending Crisis, was indeed an anomaly, for its thesis was that slavery depressed the poor whites and enabled the slave-owners to profit at their expense; but it was unsuccessful as an attempt to arouse the non-slave-holding whites.

For twenty years or more the wide difference between the two sections of the country showed itself more openly in the newspapers and journals than in any other way. The assumption on the part of southerners that their people were descendants of the Cavaliers, while those of the north represented the socially inferior Roundheads, resulted, once the cleavage began, in a sharpness of treatment of each by the other. The lack of ambition, lack of mobility, and the very sensitive "honor," so characteristic of the Southerner, made it more and more impossible for the man at the North to understand his Southern brother, especially when, to avenge his honor, the Southerner was obliged to employ personal violence, as in the case of Brooks and Sumner.

This class "honor "was at the very base of the difference between the two sections; it made the Southern