The anomalous character of Southern society, it cannot be too often repeated, is not understood and cannot be understood by the people of the North, or of Europe, otherwise than through the sharp experience of hostile and actual contact; nor otherwise than in the light of the inherent tendency and necessary educational influences of the one institution of slavery. Of the whole South, in degree, and of the Southwestern States preëminently, it may be said as a whole description in a single form of expression: _They know no other virtue than brute physical courage, and no other crime than abolitionism or negro-stealing._
All this is said, not for the purpose of blackening the South, not from partisan rancor or local prejudice, or exaggerated patriotic zeal, but because it is true. It is not true, however, of the whole population of the South, nor true, perhaps, in the absolute sense of any portion. It is impossible to characterize any people without a portion of individual injustice, or to state the drift of an individual character even, without a like injustice to better traits, adverse to the general drift, and which, to constitute a complete inventory of national or personal attributes, should be enumerated. There is at the South a large counterpoise, therefore, of adverse statement, which might be, and should be made if the object of the present writing were a complete analysis of the subject. It is, however, not so, but a statement of the preponderance of public character and opinion in those States. As a people they have their countervailing side of advantage--a great deal of amiability and refinement in certain neighborhoods, so long as their inherent right of domination is not disputed. Men and women are found, all over the South, who as individuals are better than the institution by which their characters are affected, and whose native goodness could not be wholly spoiled by its adverse operation. Slavery, too, offers certain advantages for some special kinds of culture. We of the North, on the other hand, have our own vices of a kind not to be disguised nor denied; so that the present statement should not be mistaken for an attempt to characterize in full either population. It is simply perceived that the grand distinctive drift of Southern society is directly away from the democratic moorings of our favorite republican institutions; is rapid in its current and irresistible in its momentum; and that already the divergency attained between the political and popular character of the people at the North and the South is immense; that these constantly widening tendencies--one in behalf of more and more practical enlargement of the liberty of the individual; the other backward and downward toward the despotic political dogmas and practices of the ignorant and benighted past--have proceeded altogether beyond anything which has been seen and recognized by the people of the North; and that, consequently, the whole North has been acting under a misapprehension.