DE BOW'S REVIEW

ESTABLISHED JANUARY, 1846.

JANUARY, 1860.

VOL. XXVIII., O. S.] ENLARGED SERIES. [VOL. III., No. 1, N. S.

ART. 1.-DISUNION WITHIN THE UNION.

[We confess no particular admiration of this " Disunion within the Union," of which Mr. Fitzhugh speaks, and of which the Harper's Ferry affair is a necessary type. We better like disunion out of it, when the issue comes.-ED.]

THE Harper's Ferry affair, with its extensive Northern ramifications, gives a new interest to the question of disunion. The most conservative must see, and if honest will admit, that the settlement of Northerners among us is fraught with danger. Not one in twenty of such settlers might tamper with our slaves and incite to insurrection, but one man can fire a magazine, and no one can foresee where the match will be applied, or what will be the extent and consequences of the explosion. Our wives and our daughters will see in every new Yankee face an abolition missionary. We, the men of the South, may feel for their fears, and go about to remove the cause that excites them, without being amenable to the charge of cowardice or of over-cautiousness.

The border States are the exposed frontier. Into them the underground railroad insinuates its emissaries, who steal a part of our slaves and poison the minds of the balance. Under the simple guise of the innocent farmer, Mr. Thayer may settle colonies among us as big with danger as the Greco-Trojan horse. Half the lands in these border States are without labor to cultivate them. At the present prices of negroes these lands must remain uncultivated, unless white labor, which is much cheaper, is introduced into those border States. If introduced,

it will gradually expel and drive to the South the negroes and their masters by its superior economy, or emancipate the negroes by the ballot-box or servile insurrection. We do not mean to say that Mr. Thayer is an incendiary abolitionist; far from it. He is a man of excellent sense, cool, judicious, deliberate, and calculating. He is no silly, speculative socialist, no empty rhetorician, like Sumner and Seward, nor bloodthirsty beast, like Brown and Leeman. He simply proposes to introduce white slave labor instead of black slave labor. He, we know, fully comprehends the relations and the philosophy of capital and labor. He knows that if capital emigrates ahead of labor, or if capital and labor emigrate together, the owners of the capital become the masters of the laborers, in all save the obligation to provide for them, when unfit for work. Poor Sumner is so weak as not to see that the Emigrant Aid Society of Massachusetts is merely a white slave trade company, and hence, unconsciously lauds the white slave trade with the same breath that he abuses the negro slave trade. Unless we can arrest this white slave trade of Mr. Thayer, the border States will become the property of New-England.

To effect this, two measures are necessary. The one, State legislation that shall require all New-England emigrants to give security for their good behavior. The other, the renewal of the African slave-trade, to fill up that vacuum in our population which will be filled up by abolitionists if not by negroes. The Constitution of the United States stands in the way of neither measure. It is wonderfully comprehensive and elastic, and gives an adaptability and plasticity to our institutions which constitute their chief merit.

New-Englanders coming to the South, according to the most rigid construction of the common law, are, quoad nos, persons of ill favor, suspicious persons (far inore so than idle eavesdroppers), who may and should be required to give security for their good behavior.

The law of Congress prohibiting the slave-trade is palpably unconstitutional. Congress has no other powers than those conferred by the Constitution, and no two men agree as to the clause conferring the power to abolish the slave trade. The most plausible suggestion is, that the power is included in the right to regulate cominerce. But this suggestion is rendered flagrantly absurd when we discover that to sustain it. white emigrants must be treated and considered as mere articles of commerce. The Constitution suspends the power to prohibit the "importation" or in nigration of persons until 1808.

Congress possesses the same power to declare and punish white immigration as piracy that it has to so punish the African slavetrade. These are but two, out of hundreds of measures, by which the South may attain all the ends sought for by disunion, while remaining in the Uuion.

Each State for itself may pass laws entirely prohibiting all trade or intercourse between its citizens and the citizens of one or more of the Northern States. Each Southern State may enact that all "Yankee notions," goods, wares, and merchandise, shall be forfeited when brought South, as fully and completely as negro slaves are when carried North. White Yankees are more dangerous to our peace than English or Northern free negroes; and South Carolina has established the right to prohibit the introduction of the latter. Under the law of nations, we may, and should, exclude people whose general character is that of hostility to our institutions. It is an inalienable right, for it is the right of self-defence and self preser

vation.

Let

But we would begin with nothing harsh, nothing unnecessa-. rily offensive to the North, or to any State in the North-with no measure of even doubtful constitutionality, that might, by possibility, bring us in collision with federal authorities. Virginia, which is the most exposed State, charge a heavy license on the sale of all goods from Massachusetts, as she has already done, on her pedlars, showmen, and clock-venders. If this does not suffice to bring the Bay State to fair and friendly terms, then let Virginia punish by fine and imprisonment all of her own citizens who associate with Massachusetts men, or employ Massachusetts vessels, or sell grain to Massachusetts,. or buy articles of any kind grown or manufactured in that State. No federal authority can intervene between Virginia and her own citizens, and thus a complete disunion from Massachusetts may be peacefully and constitutionally effected,. without imperilling the Federal Union.

Each Southern State, fighting its own battle of legislative retaliation, against such one or more of the Northern States,. as it deemed most inimical and dangerous, would prevent the quarrel assuming a purely sectional character, while it would divide the North.

It is impossible, by a Southern Convention, or by any other means whatever, to unite the South on measures of retaliation-madness to expect to unite her on measures of disunion..

Disunion would have different effects on different Southern States. Some would be immediately exposed to war and inva

sion, and would, therefore, be more cautious and dilatory in invoking disunion. Besides, although all political parties at the South are true on the slavery question, yet they differ as to measures, and the ascendency of different parties in the several States would prevent agreement on this vital subject. This diversity of opinion in the South, this want of union as to the means of redress, while there is thorough union of sentiment and feeling on the slavery subject, and on the wrongs inflicted upon us by the abolitionists, is fortunate for us-for union of the South would beget union of the North, estrange our thousands of warm and true friends in that region, and beget a purely sectional dispute, with the larger section. arrayed against us and our institutions. "Let us divide and conquer." We can only do so, by urging each Southern State to adopt measures of defence and retaliation for itself, and not to involve in one common denunciation and exclusion, our friends and enemies at the North. Let us be bold and fearless, but, at the same time, just, cautious, and prudent. If we will court the alliance of the conservatives of the North, while we denounce and punish her destructives, abolitionism will find itself in a very small minority. A contrary course will alienate our Northern friends, and beget a false sectional issue, in which we shall be the weaker party, and a party divided among ourselves.

We say a false issue, because this is no dispute between Northerners and Southerners; but between conservatives and revolutionionists; between Christians and infidels; between law and order men and no-government men; between the friends of private property and socialists and agrarians; between the chaste and the libidinous; between marriago and free-love; between those who believe in. the past, in history, in human experience, in the Bible, in human nature, and those who, like Greeley, and Fourier, and Fanny Wright, and Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, and Seward, foolishly, rashly, and profanely, attempt to "expel human nature," to bring about a millennium, and inaugurate a future wholly unlike anything that has preceded it. The great Christian and conservative party throughout the world is now with us. If we scorn and repudiate their alliance, if we arrogantly set up for ourselves, we thereby admit and assert that our cause and our institutions are at war with the common, moral, and religious notions of mankind. Let us rather prove to the virtuous, the religious, and conservative, that our cause is their cause, our institutions those which God has ordained, and human experi