South's Response (Part 2)

The South was quick to voice their opinion on the North’s response. With the South feeling strongly about slavery, they disagreed with everything the North stated. Sydenham Moore was an Alabama lawyer, who served for the Confederate Army. He wrote a short article called, “A Southern Response to John Brown and Black Republicanism.” This article discusses, “In the eyes of Moore and many of his colleagues, the North had become so completely subverted by antislavery radicals that the remaining patriots and conservative man of goodwill could no longer be heard.” (Preface, pg 146) The South believed that the North had, in a sense, become the fatal weakness of America.

The South also believed that the North had malicious intent behind the abolition of slavery. They stated that the North was trying to take land, money, and power from the South. They were viewed as a threat. Moore explains, “Not contented with equal privileges, equal benefits, and equal burdens of a common Government, the northern people, or at least a large majority of them, , would deprive us, as they have sought to do again and again, of all share in the common territories; would build up their manufactures by imposing upon us onerous protective tariff laws; would squander the public money for local internal improvements, and, in a thousand other ways, enrich themselves by impoverishing us.” (Moore, pg 148) The South thought very little of the North, and wanted to degrade them and their politics as much as possible. With the idea that the North was trying to ruin others to better themselves enraged the South, causing them to take a stance.

Do we agree with the ideas of the South? Why wouldn’t Southerners want to abolish slavery as much as those of the North? How do States rid of all the animosity?

Davis, David Brion. The fear of conspiracy: images of un-American subversion from the Revolution to the present. Cornell University Press, 1979.

Leave any thoughts below.

Bianca