Thus reasoned Secesh.  This was to have been the basis of competition with Northern mechanism.  The reasonings of the conspirators were consistent with the merits and morals of the conspiracy.  They calculated upon the active cooeperation of the mercenary in the North, and actually believed that the temptation to gain would prove predominant over any efforts the Northern Government could make to protect its revenue policy.  They boldly ventured upon the assumption that the influences of illicit traffic would soon become too strong to be resisted, and that in this manner, in conjunction with the agency of ‘King Cotton,’ the commerce of the North would be transferred to the South.

Another item in Southern political economy was the project of reoepening the African slave-trade.  The leaders of the secession programme had made this a prominent feature in starting the rebellion into growth.  The various phases which this branch of the question afterward underwent, was owing to the opposition of the Border States.  So much were the people of the Border States averse to being brought into competition with slave-breeding in Dahomey, that the original conspirators were obliged to forego, for a time at least, this incident in the motives of the earlier revolutionists.

A government founded on the supremacy of a class, and that class to be composed of slaveholders; a political economy founded on slave labor, free trade, illicit trade, and African kidnapping, were associations that would require great strength and influence to sustain them.  The strongest military organization was therefore contemplated.  In this, much employment could be given to the non-slaveholding masses, while military qualities of supposed superiority would enable the Southern Confederacy to enter into a successful contest with the North for empire.  The potency of ‘King Cotton’ was to be made the powerful agency with which the rest of the civilized world was to be dragooned into acquiescence.  On this delusive dream was built the fabric of that mighty empire, whose history, from its origin to its subversion, is nearly ready to be written.

It must be acknowledged that the leading influences of the rebellion were as sharp-sighted as political vice, or political immorality is ever capable of becoming.  Like all other vice, however, it based its reasonings and supposititious strength exclusively on its powers of deception, in conjunction with the iniquitous aptitudes of itself and its coadjutors.  It found co-plotters in Mozart Hall, in the stockholders of the African Slave-trade Association, scattered from Maine to Texas, and in its suborned press in New-York, Baltimore, Charleston, and New-Orleans.  It had bargained with the politically vitiated portion of the Northern Democracy for assistance, and had received a wicked though fallacious assurance from the Northern kidnappers, to the effect, that the Democracy of the North would neutralize any attempt