V.

Seeking to perpetuate this atrocious system, this right of brute force over the helpless black, and establish a despotism with Slavery as its basis, the arrogant faction boldly took up arms against the Republic. "When Fortune," says the Latin historian, "is determined upon the ruin of a people, she can so blind them as to render them insensible to danger, even of the greatest magnitude."

Their appeals to arms were in the name of justice and glory, but they were without the echo of liberty and humanity. They summoned the masses of poor whites, whom they had degraded below the level of the slave, to rise and fight for their liberties, which were as empty as the winds of the desert. There were no liberties, no privileges for the poor whites, but to curse poverty and question God's providence.

The individual desires of the few had usurped and swallowed up the rights of society. There was no society but the relation between the black man and his master. The law, order, and force were all within the control of the rich slaveholder.

The masses were either their tools, or too abject to be considered as dangerous; too ignorant to be feared as seditious, too poor to be regarded as anything more than trash, below the level and the value of the negro. This condition of the poor whites was the result of physical, political, and moral causes, long and silently at work.