The South-Carolina platform for a new government had close resemblance to the ancient Roman—­a patrician order of nobility, founded on the interested motive to uphold slavery; but allowing plebeian representation, to some extent, to the non-slaveholding classes.  Others in the South had preference for constitutional monarchy, with a class of privileged legislators, and House of Commons, composing a government of checks and balances, analogous to the English government.  Whatever the plan adopted, the leading idea was to institute a government that should be impervious, through one branch, to the future influence of the non-slaveholding majority.

It is difficult to make entirely clear the ambitious motives and mixed apprehensions that have combined to precipitate the Southern slaveholders into rebellion.  The defectiveness of the educational system of the South, and the known responsibility of slaveholders for such defect and its consequences; the defect in the industrial policy, and the responsibility of slavery itself for the depressing consequences to the non-slaveholding population, were fearful charges.  A knowledge that the causes of depression must soon be brought to the examination of Southern masses, in contrast with a better state of things in the North, filled the minds of slaveholders with jealous and fearful apprehensions toward the non-slaveholding population.  They knew that its interests were identified with the Northern educational and industrial policy.  They appreciated fully that through these interests, free labor in the South had every motive to affinity with the North, educationally, politically, and industrially.  They were astute in the discovery that under the operation of the Democratic principle, free discussion, and fair play of reason, the pro-slavery prestige must soon go down in the South before the greater numerical force of Southern masses.  It was, therefore, not only necessary, as supposed, to overturn the power of the masses in the South, but also to make them the instruments of their own overthrow as to political power.

The measurable acquiescence of the non-slaveholding population was indispensable to the revolutionary project.  Without it, there was but little numerical force.  It was, therefore, of entire consequence to make this population hate the North—­to hate the National Government, and to train it for the purposes of rebellion.  The press was suborned wherever it could be.  The pulpit manifested equal alacrity, in order to keep pace with the workings of the virus of treason.  Leading men, assuming to be statesmen and political economists, taxed their ingenuity in the invention of falsehood.  The effort of the press and politicians was directed to misrepresenting and disparaging the condition of free labor in the North; whilst the Southern pulpit was religiously engaged in establishing the divinity of slavery.  It would require a volume to delineate the arts and hypocrisy resorted to, and the false reasoning