Do not imagine for an instant that any considerations of
modesty or humiliation on the one hand, nor of haughtiness or pride on
the other, would stand in the way of the immediate participation of
those men in our affairs. Let there be no delusions either, with regard
to the ability of the same leading class of men to keep themselves in
the saddle at the South, through all political changes not involving the
absolute destruction of slavery, and the complete and consolidated
establishment of other institutions and habits of life among the people
at large;--the virtual creation, in fact, of a new and different
population, by the blending of our own Northern men and manners with the
feeble indigenous freedom-loving growth. The return of this dominant
class of cotton lords among the common masses of a Southern population
anywhere, on any terms short of the utter extinction of their basis of
wealth and distinction, will be the return of an armed overseer to a
cowering mob of insubordinate slaves. The mere assertion of their
authority will be its instant acceptance, and the most abject submission
by the people. They will only have to demand reelection to the National
Congress, and to every place of power, to be reinstated in precisely
their old position, their arrogance and self-assertion only augmented by
their having met and survived every disaster short of the destruction of
the source of their superiority.
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