There is thus no escape from Lincoln’s judgment:  “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”  It does not follow that the way to right the wrong was simple, or that instant and unmitigated emancipation was the best way.  But it does follow that, failing this, it was for the statesmen of the South to devise a policy by which the most flagrant evils should be stopped, and, however cautiously and experimentally, the raising of the status of the slave should be proceeded with.  It does not follow that the people who, on one pretext or another, shut their eyes to the evil of the system, while they tried to keep their personal dealing humane, can be sweepingly condemned by any man.  But it does follow that a deliberate and sustained policy which, neglecting all reform, strove at all costs to perpetuate the system and extend it to wider regions, was as criminal a policy as ever lay at the door of any statesmen.  And this, in fact, became the policy of the South.

“The South” meant, for political purposes, the owners of land and slaves in the greater part of the States in which slavery was lawful.  The poor whites never acquired the political importance of the working classes in the North, and count for little in the story.  Some of the more northerly slave States partook in a greater degree of the conditions and ideas of the North and were doubtfully to be reckoned with the South.  Moreover, there is a tract of mountainous country, lying between the Atlantic sea-board and the basin of the Mississippi and extending southwards to the borders of Georgia and Alabama, of which the very vigorous and independent inhabitants were and are in many ways a people apart, often cherishing to this day family feuds which are prosecuted in the true spirit of the Icelandic Sagas.

The South, excluding these districts, was predominantly Democratic in politics, and its leaders owed some allegiance to the tradition of Radicals like Jefferson.  But it was none the less proud of its aristocracy and of the permeating influence of aristocratic manners and traditions.  A very large number of Southerners felt themselves to be ladies and gentlemen, and felt further that there were few or none like them among the “Yankee” traders of the North.  A claim of that sort is likely to be aggressively made by those who have least title to make it, and, as strife between North and South grew hotter, the gentility of the latter infected with additional vulgarity the political controversy of private life and even of Congress.  But, as observant Northerners were quite aware, these pretensions had a foundation of fact.  An Englishman, then or now, in chance meetings with Americans of either section, would at once be aware of something indefinable in their bearing to which he was a stranger; but in the case of the Southerner the strangeness would often have a positive charm, such as may be found also among people of the Old World under southern latitudes and relatively primitive