said: "Most of us have had the matter under consideration for the last twenty years." And Lawrence M. Keit, one of the most active of the younger politicians, declared: "I have been engaged in this movement ever since I entered political life."
When President Buchanan in his annual message in December, 1860 declared that "the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States" had produced the estrangement which had led to present troubles, the  assertion was claimed by the poli ticians in the slave-labor States to be untrue. Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, had declared in a speech in October, 1858, that the discussion of slavery at the North had been very useful to them. After speaking of the great value of slavery to the cotton States, he observed: Such has been for us the happy results of the Abolition discussion. So far our gain has been immense from this contest, savage and malignant as it has been. Now we have solved already the question of emancipation (from connection with the Northern States) by this re-examination and exposition of the false theories of religion, philanthropy, and political economy, which embarrassed the fathers in their days. At the North and in Europe, they cried havoc, and let loose upon us all the dogs of war. And how stands it now? Why, in this very quarter of a century, our slaves have doubled in numbers, and each slave has more than doubled in value." In July, 1859, Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, said he was not one of those who believed that the South had sustained any injury by these agitations. "So far," he said, "from the institution of African slavery in our section having been weakened or rendered less secure by the discussion, my deliberate judgment is that it has been greatly strengthened and fortified." Earl Russell, the British Premier, in a letter to Lord Lyons at Washington, in May, 1861, said that one of the Confederate commissioners told him that "the principal of the causes which led to secession was not slavery, but the very high price which, for the sake of protecting Northern manufactures, the South was obliged to pay for the manufactured goods which they required."
De Bow's Review was the acknowledged organ of the slave interest. In its issue for February, 1861, George Fitzhugh, a leading publicist of Virginia, commenting on the President's message, said: "It is a gross mistake to suppose that Abolition is the cause of dissolution between the North and the South. The Cavaliers, Jacobites and the Huguenots who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North. The former are master races the latter a slave race, the dcscendants of the Saxon serfs." Mr. Fitzhugh added: "Our women are far in advance of our men in their zeal for disunion. They fear not war, for every one of them feels confident that when their sons or husbands are called to the field, they will have a faithful body-guard in their domestic servants. Slaves are the only body-guard to be relied on....They (the women) and the clergy lead and direct the disunion movement." The Charleston Mercury, edited by a son of Barnwell Rhett, and the chief organ of the conspirators of South Carolina, scorning the assertion that anything so harmless as "Abolition twaddle" had caused any sectional feelings, declared, substantially, that it was an abiding consciousness of the degradation of the "chivalric Southrons" being placed on an equality in government with "the boors of the North" that made "Southern gentlemen" desire disunion. It said haughtily, "We are the most aristocratic people in the world. Pride of caste, and color, and privilege makes every man an aristocrat in feelings.
It was by men of this cast of mind that "Southern Rights" associations were formed, and were fostered for nearly thirty years before the Civil War, with disunion as their prime object. The feeling of contempt for the Northern masses among the "chivalric Southrons" was more intense in South Carolina than elsewhere. The self constituted leaders of the people there, who hated democracy and a republican form of government, who yearned for the pomps of royalty and the privileges of an hereditary aristocracv, and who had persuaded themselves and the "common people" around them that they were superior to
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