The supposition of the conquest of the Northern
States by the Southern Vandals has been already glanced at and
sufficiently considered for so remote and improbable a contingency. The
counter supposition of the entire success of the United States
Government in the reassertion of its own authority over the whole of its
original domain, divided, at the commencement of the war, into two
branches.
It was the general theory at the North, at that time, that the _animus_
of rebellion was confined at the South to comparatively few minds, and
that the war was to be a war, not against the South as a people, but
against a tyrannical and usurping faction at the South, and for the
defence of the people at large residing in that region. There was a
modicum of truth in this theory, but events have shown, and any one who
knew the South well might safely have predicted, that the whole people
there would soon be subdued to the authority of those few. Such was the
terror throughout the confederacy, and still is, where the facts have
not been already changed by the war, at the mere imputation of sympathy
with anti-slavery sentiment in any form, that a part, hardly one tenth
even of the whole, in numerical strength, could successfully put the
remaining nine tenths into Coventry, and bully them out of all
expression of adverse opinion, by simply threatening to accuse them of
abolition tendencies. No people on earth were ever so completely _cowed_
by the nightmare of unpopular opinion as the people of the South.
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