Their language was loud and obscene, such as I never heard before from any but the most depraved and beastly women of the streets.  Upon observing me they dropped their voices, but not with any appearance of shame, and continued their altercation until their mistresses entered.  The white children, in the mean time, had listened without any appearance of wonder or annoyance.  The moment the ladies opened the door, they became silent.—­Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 222.

The Southern Cultivator for June, 1855, speaks of many young men and women who have ’made shipwreck of all their earthly hopes, and been led to the fatal step by the seeds of corruption which in the days of childhood and youth were sown in their hearts by the indelicate and lascivious manners and conversation of their fathers’ negroes.’  If we had no other fact or cause to cite, this almost unnamable one might convince the reader that there must be a groundwork somewhere in the South among good, moral, and decent people, for antipathy to slavery,—­human nature teaches us as much.  And such people exist, not only among the hardy inhabitants of the inland districts, who are not enervated by wealth and ‘exclusiveness,’ but in planterdom itself.

There are few in the North who realize the number of persons in the South who silently disapprove of slavery on sound grounds, such as I have mentioned.  Does it seem credible that nearly ten millions of people should socially sympathize with some three hundred thousand slave-holders, who act with intolerable arrogance to all non-slave-holders?  ‘Even in those regions where slavery is profitable,’ as a writer in the Boston Transcript well expresses it, ’the poor whites feel the slaveocracy as the most grinding of aristocracies.’

In those regions where it is not profitable, the population regard it with a latent abhorrence, compared with which the rhetorical and open invectives of Garrison and Phillips are feeble and tame.  Anybody who has read Olmsted’s truthful narrative of his experience in the slave States can not doubt this fact.  The hatred to slavery too often finds its expression in an almost inhuman hatred of ‘niggers,’ whether slave or free, but it is none the less significant of the feelings and opinions of the white population.

As I write, every fresh thunder of war and crash of victory is followed by murmurs of amazement at the enthusiastic receptions which the Union forces meet in most unexpected strongholds of the enemy, in the very heart of slavedom.  Yet it was known months ago, and prophesied, with the illustration of undeniable facts, that this counter-revolutionary element existed.  One single truth was forgotten,—­that these Southern friends of the Union, even while avowing that slavery must be supported, had no love of it in their hearts.  Emancipation has been sedulously set aside under pretence of conciliating them; but