'We have conquered an outlet to the Pacific which must be
maintained, though we can desire no dominion on the Pacific coast,
but such as may be sufficient to secure the terminus of our great
Pacific railroad through Texas and Arizona. Toward the north and
east, the Maryland and Pennsylvania line, including Delaware, is
our true landmark. Kansas, on the other side, must be conquered and
confiscated to pay for the negroes stolen from us, abolitionism
expelled from its borders, and transformed into a Slave State of
the confederacy. Perhaps, after we have done with Lincoln, this
arrangement may be very acceptable to a majority in Kansas, without
force. We will have no desire to disturb Mexico so long as she
conducts herself peaceably toward us, and, as a neighbor, maintains
good faith in her dealings with us. Central America must remain as
a future consideration; and, instead of the acquisition of Cuba,
she has become our _friendly ally_, identified with us in interests
and institutions, and, so long as she continues to hold slaves,
connected with us by the closest ties.'
But the strong point of the article consists in a fierce onslaught on
foreigners, all of whom, save those now resident in the South, are to be
excluded from citizenship and office. 'With the exception of these, and
after that time, no more votes should be allowed, and no' more offices
be held, except by _native-born_ citizens of the confederacy.'
'The naturalization law of the old Government has proved of little
benefit to the Southern States. Whilst our Southern adopted
citizens have proven themselves reliable, faithful, and true to
our institutions of the South, those of the North, who outnumber
them twenty to one, have universally arrayed themselves foremost
and in front of Lincoln's hordes in the work of rapine, murder, and
destruction against the South. _Hereafter then, we can make no
distinction between the Yankee and the foreigner, and both must
necessarily be debarred of the privilege of citizenship in this
confederacy._'
Delony, it seems, has 'viewed this question in all its bearings,'
'foremost and in front' of course included, and deems its adoption
eminently essential to the future stability and welfare of the
confederacy. The abolition of _all_ impost duties and a system of direct
taxation, are of course warmly advocated--meaning thereby the ruin of
Northern manufactures by smuggling European goods over our border. In
short, he sets forth plainly what is as yet far from being felt or
generally understood, that the independence of the Southern confederacy
must inevitably bring with it the total ruin of the North, and the
entire exclusion from its citizenship and offices of all persons other
than native-born Southerners.
'Article V.' is one of those intensely snobbish, sickening,
self-conscious essays on 'Gentility,' which none but a Southerner is
capable of writing. The innate vulgarity of its author, 'J. T. Wiswall,
of Alabama,' is shown in such expressions as 'a pretty Romeo of
seventeen, that looks as charming as sweet sixteen, _gallused up_ in
tight unmentionables,' and in artless confessions that he--J. T.
Wiswall--belongs to a class above the snob, but still to one 'whose
conversation stalks as on stilts,' and which is foppish, effeminate, and
ostentatious. The conclusion is, of course, the worship of
'aristocracy,' a worship of which, as J.T. Wiswall infers from his own
shallow reading and flimsy experience, exists 'in every heart.' The
wants of the rich, their 'toys and gauds,' 'were made to relieve the
sufferings of the poor,' and the 'ceaseless abuse of aristocracy is
_therefore_ absurd.' Without the great truths, based on these relations
of rich and poor, J. T. W., the apostle of 'Gentility,' thinks that
'society is a murderous anarchy; without these, revolution follows
revolution, and barbarism closes the hideous drama of national
existence. On these alone hang all the law and prophets.'
The remaining articles of '_De Bow's Review, Industrial Resources_,
etc.,' are devoted to Free Trade, the Progress of the War, and the
Coal-Fields of Arkansas, none of them, with the exception of the latter,
presenting aught like an approach to a useful truth. The magazine is,
however, as a whole both curious and characteristic. It shows, as in a
mirror, the enormous ambition, the uneasy vanity, the varnished
vulgarity of the Southerner, his claims to scrupulous honor, outflanked
and contradicted at every turn by an innate tendency to exaggerate and
misrepresent, and his imperfect knowledge employed as a basis for the
most weighty conclusions. And it is such writers and thinkers who
accurately set forth the ideas and principles on which the great
experiment of the Southern aristocratic confederacy is to be based--in
case of its success. A tremendous Ism, fringed with bayonets! There is
strength in bayonets, but what stability is there in the Ism which
supports them?