THE NEW SOUTH.

BY HON. JOHN S. WISE, OF VIRGINIA.

"Out of the eater came forth meat,

And out of the strong came forth sweetness."

THE earliest recorded triumph of Samson was when he went down into the vineyards of Timnath in the land of the Philistines and, unarmed, slew a young roaring lion. The story runs that after a time Samson returned to view the carcass of the lion, and behold there was a swarm of bees and honey within the carcass. This was the occasion of his giving forth, at his wedding-feast, the famous riddle which heads this article.

The earliest recorded triumph of the Republican party was its battle with, and conquest of, that young roaring lion, African Slavery. If Republicanism could be personified and return to behold the carcass of the victim in the South, it would, like Samson of old, find that carcass filled with a swarm of busy bees, and teeming with the honey of diversified industries unknown to it in the dreamy days of slavery.

I am not sure that my simile is original. It seems to me that some one else has used the same. Who, if any one, I do not know. But whether it be original or not, I will appropriate it.

Two great ideas were born at the same time that our Federal Government was created by the Convention of 1787. One was the National Idea, the other the Federal or Statesrights Idea. Very soon the advocates of the national idea adopted the name of Federalists, and the States-rights advocates became known as Republicans or Democrats. From that time until this, under changing names, the two ideas have been respectively the basis of party organization in the two leading parties, although the Federalists have at last assumed the name of Republicans, and the States-rights advocates have fallen back upon the simple name of Democracy.

Both parties, as they were originally formed, professed faith

in and attachment to the Union, but in the " strict construction" party at the outset was to be found every man who opposed the formation of the Union. And in both have been found, from the first, men who have pressed their respective theories far beyond the bounds of reason. But a study of the history of the Federalist party plainly discloses that in its struggles for supremacy it has always shown more regard for the preservation of the autonomy of the States than has been shown for the preservation of the Union by those who have put the idea of States rights above that of Union.

In their origin these two conflicting ideas were not sectional. Ultra Federalists were abundant in the South, and theoretical secessionists and nullifiers were to be found in the North. In time, local interests and the surroundings of men, those most powerful of all molders of opinion, consigned the national idea to the domain of the North, and the States-rights doctrine. recognized the South as its true habitat. Negro slavery produced this territorial array of opinion. As it, almost alone, gave rise to the supremacy of the "strict-construction "theory in the South, I propose to show that with the abolition of slavery has died almost every reason why the South should longer adhere to that idea, and that, following the abolition of slavery, many reasons have arisen why the South should, above any other section of our country, become the advocate of a liberal construction of Federal powers.

In the Federal Convention of 1787, when parties first became arrayed upon these ideas, the Southern States had a powerful and eloquent representation favoring the national idea. The conception of one Incorporate Union in lieu of the old Articles of Confederation originated no less with Messrs. Randolph and Madison of Virginia than with Mr. Hamilton and other Northern men. Mr. Randolph's plan, known as the "Virginia plan," which was first adopted by the convention and afterwards voted down, conferred much more power on the Federal Government than any of the other plans submitted. It was supported by Southern representatives, and its opponents were from Connecticut, New Jersey, and other Northern States. They insisted that it was too national.

The plan ultimately agreed upon was that presented by Mr. Pinckney of South Carolina. Hamilton and Jay of the North, Washington and Madison of the South, became its most eloquent advocates. The Union was as much the work of the South as of the North. The most splendid appeal for the perpetuity of the Federal idea to be found in our language is the Farewell Address of George Washington, a Southern man. And this feeling was most natural. The South had played a conspicuous part, not only in the achievement of our liberties, but in all the proceedings which brought about the Government of the United States. Her representatives aided in drafting our Constitution, and counseled its adoption. Her people rejoiced in the consummation of the scheme, and re-echoed the sentiments of Washington that it was a compact of perpetual union. At that day slavery had not become the all-controlling power, and sectionalism, its legitimate concomitant, had not taken absolute possession, as it did later, of the advocates and opponents of the States-rights theory.

Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, the ablest and most powerful strict-constructionist of his day, was an abolitionist. Yet at the same time he was a man whose views on the affairs of the Union were as broad as those of the most pronounced Federalist. The Federal idea never had a more eloquent expounder than Virginia's John Marshall, Chief-Justice of the United States. Indeed, Virginia was the natural home of a love of the Union and of those views which favored a broad and liberal construction of the Constitution.

The slavery question became dominant very soon after the Union was formed. It arose with more violence at the admission of each new State, and every agitation intensified the sectional feeling. The South was wedded to slavery. It felt that slavery was safe so long as Federal power was limited and circumscribed and the absolute control of domestic affairs left to the States. It felt that the one danger to slavery from Federal power was from the free States acquiring a preponderance of power in Congress through the admission of new States, which would enable them to pass laws enlarging Federal jurisdiction.

The North, on the other hand, chafed, and was indignant that the power and growth of the Nation should be retarded, and all things subordinated to, and allowed to advance only at even pace with, slavery. The slave power was in the ascendant for half a century, and right jealously and dictatorially did it hug the States-rights idea as the sheet-anchor of slavery.

It is proper enough for philanthropists to say that slavery was wrong and was a curse. Grant it. But until human nature is framed upon a higher model than that of the present, the man who is hereditary owner of slaves, in the enjoyment of the luxury which their possession brings to him, will not see it either as a sin or as a curse, and will not voluntarily yield up his wealth to an abstract principle.

If the climate of the North had suited slavery, and the conditions of the two sections, as they were, had been reversed, I have no doubt in my own mind that the political views of the people of the two sections on slavery, and their consequent States-rights notions, would have been reversed also. We are very much alike, and all creatures of circumstances governed by our surroundings. None of us are as much better than the others as we are wont to think ourselves.

ture.

Whether slavery was right or wrong, it was very comfortable for the slave-owner, and he was the only one in that section who had a voice as to whether it should be abolished. It is all very well to say he pursued a ruinous system of agriculGrant that he did not make as much as he might have done. Still he made enough to support his slaves, and furnish himself in luxury. Only one family was to be made luxurious where many contributed to that end. It was easy to waste a great deal and yet do that. We may say that he had no schools. He did not want them. White population was sparse even if he had desired to educate his "poor white" dependents. He did not. He owned the slaves, and it was better for his interests that poor whites should not be so elevated as to become independent of him, their patron. As for his sons and daughters, his wealth enabled him to employ the best of private tutors, and to send them to Europe and the universities.

We may say that he had no manufactures. He could not