Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 03.djvu/163

Rh as "common whites": "This was the plebs romana, the crowds of clients who parade with ostentation the title of citizen, and only exercise its privilege in blind subserviency to the great slaveholders, who were the real masters of the country. If slavery had not existed in their midst, they would have been workers and tillers of the soil, and might have become farmers and small proprietors. But the more their poverty draws them nearer to the inferior class of slaves, the more anxious are they to keep apart from them, and they spurn work in order to set off more ostentatiously their qualities of freemen." Page 87.

Really it is hard to conceive from what source the Comte could have derived this information. The census of 1860 shows that in all the slave States, except South Carolina and Mississippi, the white population exceeded not only the slaves, but the entire colored population, and in some of them very largely—the white population in the eleven States that regularly seceded being 5,447,199, the free colored 132,760, and the slaves 3,521,110, while in Kentucky and Missouri the white population was from four to eight times the number of slaves. Now it is well known that the slaveholders constituted a very small minority of the white population. How was it, then, that the non-slaveholding whites subsisted at all, if they owned no land and would not work? Does the Comte mean to intimate that the large slaveholders fed and clothed all the whites who were not slaveholders? And yet his American editor says: "In a large and philosophic view of American institutions he has rivalledrivaled [sic] DeTocqueville."

To point out all the numerous errors of opinion, speculation and fact contained in the published volume of his "History," would be an interminable task, and I will close my notice of the author's mistakes by calling attention to one more statement on pages 141-2. He says: "The seceders on their side had not lost a moment in Virginia. They were in possession of Richmond when the convention was in session; they surrounded it, threatening their opponents with death, and extorted from it the ordinance of secession, which, however, was passed by a vote of only eighty-eight to fifty-five."

I was a member of the Virginia Convention which adopted the ordinance of secession, and voted against its passage; and this is the first that I have ever learned of the convention having been surrounded by the secessionists, or of the extortion of the ordinance from it by threats of death or of any other violence. That