Daily intelligencer. [volume] (Wheeling, Va. [W. Va.]) 1859-1865, 1860-11-17

We publish by request, the letter which
appears in our columns this morning, from
Judge Field, of Charlottesville. 1t is an
excellent, sensible, patriotic and practical
letter, and will deseryedly have much
weight throughout the State. Tho Judge
appreheuds exactly the ground work of
South Cardinals complaint, and of this
whole secession movement in the South.
He says it is "mainly to open the slave
trade, in order to get cheaper negroes for
the cotton lauds. There is no donbt of
this fact. The Judge sees the thing Just
as it is. The real trouble with South
Carolina, as our contemporary of the Prori-
dence Or. ~ Journal well observes, is a
chronic one-no new thing at all-existed
long before slavery was an issue in the
nation-away back in the tariff times OF
'32. ''There is nothing in the election of
Lincoln that affords any sort of reason
for the tumult into which the people of
that and of two or three adjoining States
have thrown themselves. The worst that
they can apprehend is that he will take
tie same view of the territorial question
that Clay and Webster took, that every
body took till within few years, when
the doctrine was FIRST discovered that the
chief purpose of the federal government
was to extend slavery, and to make free
labor degrading. The personal liberty
bills of the free States are adduced as the
cause of complaint Apart from the fact
that the States which make all the COM
plant are those which least suffer from
the escape of fugitives. and that the
States which suffer most in, this respect
are loyal to the Union, there is nothing
new in these euactments Many of them
were passsd before the Republican party
was formed some of them by Wing and
some by Democratic legislatures If they
are sufficient cause for disunion, the
Union should have been broken long ago.
For twenty years the spirit of disunion
has been rife in South Carolina, and it
has occasionally extended into other States.
1t is not strange that men who regarded n
protective tariff and the admission of
California with free Constitution as a
just cause of disunion, should see equal
cause in the election of an unacceptable
candidate to the Presidency. There is no
thing in all of this commotiou that surpri-
ses us; nothing we did not expect. Our
readers will remember that we have told
them that, in our opinion, the men who
had so often and under such variety of
pretcxts, threatened disunion, and who
again threatened it in case of Lincolu's
election, were in earnest, that they meant
what they said. and that they would break
up the Unionif they could And we ad-
vised that whoever was scared by this
demonstration, whoever was willing to
conciliate the traditional discomfort of
South Carolina, by the sacrifice Of his man
illness and his citizenship, should vote,
not for the candidate he preferred, but for
the one which she dictated. She can
make great deal of trouble, and with the
= aidwhich it is likely she will have from
other states, she can force our institutions
10 test which it upleasant to bear, but
which they must bear as often as it is APP
piled, or they are not what our fathers in
tended and what we require.
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