Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/27

Rh tariff one of its demands. And when it had elected a President (by a sectional and a minority popular vote, be it remembered) and so caused a disruption of the union of States, "protection" was a primary means employed to support the war that followed—a war of aggression and conquest waged by this party to secure both its own continued supremacy and the new consolidated and un-American union of force in place of the pristine confederated union of choice which itself had done so much to destroy; a war in which Negro emancipation in parts of the Southern States was incidentally proclaimed as a military measure, the thirteenth amendment coming later to extend and validate this unconstitutional proceeding. "Un-American union of force," I said; we must remember that widespread opposition to the war of conquest against the South manifested itself in the North, and that the myriads of immigrants from centralist, "blood-and-iron" Germany had much to do with turning the scale in the North in support of Lincoln's and Seward's war. (c) In these aliens there had arisen "a new king which knew not Joseph," who had no inconvenient recollections of '76 to hold him in check. (Note: The foregoing was originally written before the outbreak of the European war of 1914, much of the responsibility for which must be laid to the charge of this same "blood-and-iron" nation.)

This so-called free-soil movement were more accurately styled a white-soil movement. For hand in hand with the efforts to keep Negro slaves out of the new States and territories of the North and the West, went drastic anti-free-Negro laws in those regions as well as in the older Northern States. (These laws are to be found discussed most illuminatingly in Ewing's Legal and Historical Status of the Dred Scott Decision, chapter iv. See, also, Northern Rebellion and Southern Secession, by the same author, page 113.) The Negro, slave or free, was not wanted in the North and West. Long since had Jefferson, the honest abolitionist, pointed out that, (40) "The passage of slaves from one State to another would not, make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it. So their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier