fanaticism.  We almost deified the flag of the Union, under whose folds it was made immortal by the Huguenots, the Roundheads, the Cavaliers, and men of every faith and conviction in the crowning days of the revolution.  The deeds of her great men, the history of the past, were an equal heritage of all—­we felt bound together by natural bonds equal to the ties of blood or kindred.  We loved her towering mountains, her rolling prairies, her fertile fields, her enchanting scenery, her institutions, her literature and arts, all; all were equally the South’s as well as the North’s.  Not for one moment would the South pluck a rose from the flowery wreath of our goddess of liberty and place it upon the brow of our Southland alone.  The Mississippi, rising among the hills and lakes of the far North, flowing through the fertile valleys of the South, was to all our “Mother Nile.”  The great Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada chained our Western border together from Oregon to the Rio Grande.  The Cumberland, the Allegheny, and the Blue Ridge, lifting their heads up from among the verdant fields of Vermont, stretching southward, until from their southern summit at “Lookout” could be viewed the borderland of the gulf.  In the sceneries of these mountains, their legends and traditions, they were to all the people of the Union what Olympus was to the ancients.  Where the Olympus was the haunts, the wooing places of the gods of the ancient Greeks, the Appalachian was the reveling grounds for the muses of song and story of the North and South alike.  And while the glories of the virtues of Greece and Rome, the birthplace of republicanism and liberty, may have slept for centuries, or died out entirely, that spirit of national liberty and personal freedom was transplanted to the shores of the New World, and nowhere was the spirit of freedom more cherished and fostered than in the bright and sunny lands of the South.  The flickering torch of freedom, borne by those sturdy sons of the old world to the new, nowhere took such strong and rapid growth as did that planted by the Huguenots on the soil of South Carolina.  Is it any wonder, then, that a people with such high ideals, such lofty spirits, such love of freedom, would tamely submit to a Union where such ideals and spirits were so lightly considered as by those who were now in charge of the government—­where our women and children were to be at the mercies of a brutal race, with all of their passions aroused for rapine and bloodshed; where we would be continually threatened or subjected to a racial war, one of supremacy; where promises were made to be broken, pledges given to be ignored; where laws made for all were to be binding only on those who chose to obey?  Such were some of the conditions that confronted South Carolina and her sister States at this time, and forced them into measures that brought about the most stupendous civil war in modern or ancient times.

To sum up:  It was not love for the Union, but jealousy of the South’s wealth.  It was not a spirit of humanity towards the slaves, but a hatred of the South, her chivalry, her honor, and her integrity.  A quality wanting in the one is always hated in that of the other.