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.