The Sun.
London, England, 1861-05-28 00:00:00

711 E CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

(From the Special Correspondent of the Times.)
THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

APRIL 30.

Nothing I could say can be worth one fact which
has forced itself upon my mind in reference to the
sentiments which prevail among the gentlemen of
this State. I have been among them for several
days. I have visited their plantations, I have con-
versed with them freely and fully, and I have en-
joyed that frank, courteous, and graceful inter-
course which constitutes an irresistible charm of
their society. From all quarters has come to my
ears the echoes of the same voice ; it may be feigned,
but there is no discord in the note, and it sounds
in wonderful strength and monotony all over the
country. Shades of George 111., of North, of John-
son, of all who contended against the great rebel-
lion which tore these colonies from England, can
you hear the chorus which rings through the State
of Marion, Sumter, and Pinckney, and not clap
your ghostly hands in triumph ? That voice says,
"If we could only get one of the Royal race of
England to rule over us we should be content."
Let there be no misconception on this point. That
sentiment, varied in a hundred ways, has been
repeated to me over and over again. There is a
general admission that the means to such an end
are wanting, and that the desire cannot be gratified.
But the admiration for monarchical institutions on
the English model, for privileged classes, and for a
landed aristocracy and gentry, is undisguised and
apparently genuine. With the pride of having
achieved their independence is mingled in the
South Carolinians' hearts a strange regret at the
result and consequences, and many are they who
" would go back to-morrow if we could." An intense
affection for the British connexion, a love of British
habits and customs, a respect for British sentiment,
law, authority, order, civilization, and literature pre-
eminently distinguish the inhabitants of this State,
who, glorying in their descent from ancient fami-
lies on the three islands, whose fortunes they still
follow, and with whose members they maintain not
unfrequently familiar relations, regard with an
aversion of which it is impossible to give an idea to
one who has not seen its manifestations the people
of New England and the populations of the Northern
States, whom they regard as tainted beyond cure by
the venom of " Puritanism." Whatever may be the
cause, this is the fact and the effect. " The State of
South Carolina was," I am toad, " founded by gen-
tlemen." It was not established by witch-burning
Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics, who im-
planted in the north the standard of Torquemada,
and breathed into the nostrils of their newly-born
colonies all
,the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rabid
intolerance of the Inquisition. It is absolutely
astounding to a stranger who aims at the preserva-
tion of a decent neutrality to mark the violence of
these opinions. "If that confounded ship had sunk
with those Pilgrim Fathers on board," says one.
" we never should have been driven to these extre
mities !" "We could have got on with the fanatics
if they had bean either Christians or gentlemen,"
says another ; " for in the first case they would
have acted with common charity, and in the second
they would have fought when they insulted us ;
but there are neither Christians nor gentlemen
among them !" " Anything on the earth !"
exclaims a third, "any form of Govern-
ment, any tyranny or despotism you will ;
but"—and here is an appeal more terrible than
the adjuration of all the Gods—" nothing
on earth shall ever induce us to submit to any
union with the brutal, bigotted blackguards of the
New England States, who neither comprehend nor
regard the feelings of gentlemen ! Man, woman,
and child, we'll die first." Imagine these and an
infinite variety of similar sentiments uttered by
courtly, well-educated men, who set great store on
a nice observance of the usages of society, and who
are only moved to extreme bitterness and anger
when they speak of the North, and you will fail to
conceive the intensity of the dislike of the South
Carolinians for the Free States. There are national
antipathies on our side of the Atlantic which are
tolerably strong and have been unfortunately per-
tinacious and long-lived. The hatred of the Italian
for the Tedesco, of the Greek for the Turk, of the
Turk for the Russ, is warm and fierce enough to
satisfy the Prince of Darkness, not to speak of a few
little pet aversions among allied Powers and the
atoms of composite empires ; but they are all mere
indifference and neutrality of feeling compared to
the animosity evinced by the " gentry" of South
Carolina for the rabble of the North."
The contests of Cavalier and Roundhead, of \Ten-
dean and Republican, even of Orangeman and
Croppy, have been elegant joustings, regulated by
the finest rules of chivalry, compared with those
which North and South will carry on if their deeds
support their words. " Immortal hate, the study of
revenge" will actuate every blow, and never in the
history of the world, perhaps, will go forth such a
dreadful vce victis as that which may be heard before
the fight has begun. There is nothing in all the dark
caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the
hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees.
That hatred has been swelling for years till it is the
very life blood of the State. It has set South Caro-
lina to work steadily to organise her resources for
the struggle which she intended to provoke if it did
not come in the course of time. " Incompatibility
of temper" would have been sufficient ground for
the divorce, and I am satisfied that there has been
a deep-rooted design, conceived in some men's minds
30 years ago, and extended gradually year after
year to others', to break away from the Union at the
very first opportunity. The North is to South Caro-
lina a corrupt and evil thing, to which for long
years she has been bound by burning chains, while
monopolists and manufacturers fed on her tender
limbs. She has been bound in a Maxentian union to

the object she loathes. New England is to her the
incarnation of moral and political wickedness and
social corruption. It is the source of everything
which South Carolina hates, and of the torrents of

free thought and taxed manufactures, of Abolition-
ism and of Filibustering, which have flooded the
land. Believe a Southern man as he believes him-

self, and you must regard New England and
the kindred States as the birthplace of im-

purity of mind among men and of unchastity in
women—the home of Free Love, of Fourierism, of
infidelity, of Abolitionism, of false teachings in
political economy and in social life ; a land satu-
rated with the drippings of rotten philosophy, with
the poisonous infections of a fanatic press ; without
honour or modesty : whose wisdom is paltry cun-
ning, whose valour and manhood have been swal-
lowed up in a corrupt, howling demagogy, and in
the marts of a dishonest commerce. It is the mer-

chants of New York who fit out ships for the slave
trade, and carry it on in Yankee ships. It is the capi-
tal of the North which supports, and it is Northern
men who concoct and execute, the Filibustering
expeditions which have brought discredit on the
ense.ranltnanthdeiglnarograenctitiieeestupreeorpsLe
the country by an unprincipled
Slave-hold
tinielf
abnySdtiaitnti
areippret
shcsoe.r
trTouhe populatispvons, indeed, know how to read
and write, but they don't know how to think, and
they are the easy victims 0 the wretched impostors

" Who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies ?"
Assuredly the New England demon who has
been persecuting the South till its intolerable
cruelty and insolence forced her, in a spasm of
agony, to rend her chains asunder. The New Eng-
lander must have something to persecute, and as he
has hunted down all his Indians, burnt all his
witches, and persecuted all his opponents to the
death, he invented Abolitionism as the sole resource
left to him for the gratification of his favourite pas-
sion. Next to this motive principle is his desire to
make money dishonestly, trickily, meanly, and
shabbily. He has acted on it in all his relations
with the South, and has cheated and plundered her
in all his dealings by villanous tariffs. If one ob-
jects that the South must have been a party to this,
because her boast is that her statesmen have ruled
the Government, of the country, you are told that
the South yielded out of pure good-nature. Now,
however, she will have free trade, and will open the
coasting trade to foreign nations, and shut out from
it the Lated Yankees, Rho so long monopolised and
made their fortunes by it. Under all the varied
burdens and miseries to which she was subjected,
the South held fast to her sheet anchor. South
Carolina was the mooring ground in which it found
the surest hold. The doctrine of State Rights was
her salvation, and the fiercer the storm raged
against her—the more stoutly demagogy, immigrant
preponderance, and the blasts of universal suffrage
bore down on her, threatening to sweep away the
vested interests of the South in her right to govern
the States—the greater was her confidence and the
more resolutely she held on her cable. The North
attracted " hordes of ignorant Germans and Irish,"
and the scum of Europe, while the South repelled
them. The industry, the capital of the North in-
creased with enormous rapidity, under the influence
of cheap labour and manufacturing ingenuity and
enterprise, in the villages which swelled into towns,
and the towns which became cities, under the unen-
vious eye of the South. She, on the contrary, toiled
on slowly, clearing forests and draining swamps to
find new cotton-grounds and rice-fields for the em-
ployment of her only industry and for the develop-
ment of her only capital—" involuntary labour."
The tide of immigration waxed stronger, and
by degrees she saw the districts into which she
claimed the right to introduce that eapi-
, and occupied by tal closed against her.

free labour. The doctrine of squatter " sove-
reignty," and the force ofhostile tariffs, which placed
a heavy duty on the very articles which the South
most required, completed the measure of injuries to
which she was subjected, and the spirit of discon-
tent found vent in fitly debate, in personal insults,
and in acrimonious speaking and writing, which

increased in intensity in proportion as the Abolition
movement, and the contest between the Federal
principle and State Rights, became more vehement.
I am desirous of shoving in a few words, for the
information of English readers, how it is that the
Confederacy which Europe knew simply as a
political entity has succeeded in dividing itself.
The Slave States held the doctrine, or say they did,
that each State was independent as France or ag
England, but that for certain purposes they chose
a common agent to deal with foreign nations, and
to impose taxes for the purpose of paying the ex-
penses of the agency. We, it appears, talked of
American citizens when there were no such beings
at all. There were, indeed, citizens of the sove-
reign State of South Carolina, or of Georgia, or
Florida, who permitted themselves to pass under
that designation, but it wqs merely as a matter of
personal convenience. It will be difficult for Euro
peans to understand this doctrine, as nothing like it
has been heard before, and no such Confederation of
sovereign States has ever existed in any country in
the world. The Northern men deny that it existed
here, and claim for the Federal Government powers
not compatible with such assumptions. 2/wy have
lived for the Union, they served it, they laboured

for and made money by it. A man as a New York
man was nothing—as an American citizen he was a
great deal. A South Carolinian objected to lose his
identity in any description which included him and
a « Yankee clocktnaker" in the same category. The
Union was against him ; he remembered that he
came from a race of English gentlemen who had
been persecuted by the representatives—for he will
not call them the ancestors—of the Puritans of
New England, and he thought that they were
animated by the same hostility to himself. He
was proud of old names, and he felt pleasure '
in tracing his connexion with old families in the
old country. His plantations were held by old
charters, or had been in the hands of his fathers
for several generations ; and he delighted to remem-
ber that, when the Stuarts were banished from their
throne' and their country, the burgesses of South
Carolina had solemnly elected the wandering
Charles King of their State, and had offered him
eri
ed may
his
fortunesexercise
an asylum and a kingdom. The philosophical his-
torianr to Charleston.
in conjecturing
what would have been the result if the fugitive had
a
South Carolina contains 34,000 square miles and
a population of 720,000 inhabitants, of whom
385,000 are black slaves. In the old rebellion it was
distracted between revolutionary principles and the
loyalist predilections, and at least one-half of the
planters were faithful to George 111., nor did they
yield till Washington sent an army to support their
antagonists and drove them from the colony.
In my next letter I shall give a brief account of a
visit to some of the planters, as far as it can be made
consistent with the obligations which the rites and
rights of hospitality impose on the guest as well as
upon the host. These gentlemen are well-bred,
courteous, and hospitable. A genuine aristocracy,
they have time to cultivate their minds, to apply
themselves to politics and the guidance of public
affairs. They travel and read, love field sports,
racing, shooting, hunting, and fishing, are bold
horsemen, and good shots. But, after all, their State
is a modern Sparta—an aristocracy resting on a
helotry, and with nothing else to rest upon. Al-
though t hey profess (and I believe, indeed, sincerely)
to hold opinions in opposition to the opening of the
slave trade, it is nevertheless true that the cause in
the constitution of the Confederate States which pro-
hibited the importation of negroes was especially and
energetically resisted by them, because, as they say,
it seemed to be an admission that slavery was in
itself an evil and a wrong. Their whole system rests
on slavery, and as such they defend it. They en-
tertain very exaggerated ideas of the military
iteseramrnu
military spirit. although one
spirit. Out of
they cannot reckon more
any arithmetic, and
mstt taa:eyinnr
dg
whole
hoh:o0uololfelo
justicepao theirdpuu ll
at littletitoo n
men
by
as there are nearly 30,000 plantations which must
be, according to law, superintended by white men,
a considerable number of these adults cannot be
spared from the State for service in the open field.
The
negroes,i can raise their crops
w
confidentby
y that the negroes
the labour of their
at
and
r dys t
inconvenienceho ae
ys t
seem
e thatem
will work without superintendence. But the expe-
riment is rather dangerous, and it will only be tried
in the last extremity.

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA, MAY 1.

It is said that fools build houses for wise men
to live in." Be that true or not, it is certain that
Uncle Sam" has built strong places for his enemies
to occupy. To-day I visited
Fort Pulaski, which
defends the mouth of the Savannah river and the
approaches to the city. It was left to the care of
itself, and the Georgians quietly stepped into it, and
have been busied in completing its defences, so that
it is now capable of stopping a, feet very effeetwi) ly.