The Nebraska excitement scarcely reaches Texas. The intelligent large planters are generally gratified and grateful to Senator Douglas for his unexpected and gratuitous offer, but consider it of doubtful value to themselves in particular, because the opening of Nebraska to slave-settlers would bring its lands in competition before immigrants with those in Texas, and most wealthy Texans are extensive land-owners and speculators as well as slave-owners. For this reason they are reconciled to the vote of Houston against the measure, and the absence of Rusk from the Senate when the vote was taken.

The poorer class of Americans know little about the matter, and are indifferent. The Germans alone are led to think and reflect. To assist them, you will be surprised to learn that a translation of Mr. Seward’s speech in the Senate has been extensively circulated under the frank of Gen. Houston.

”Der alte Fuchs!” (the old fox!) I heard one of them exclaim, as he observed this significant circumstance.

There is a difference in the political sentiment of the people of the [282] North and the South, with which, during all my extended tour, I have been more and more painfully impressed.

Patriotism at the North is much more generous and national in its application than it is at the South. There are evident indications of this in the action and speeches of public men, particularly on any subject in which the most jealous and sensitive inquisitiveness can suspect a danger of overlooking all the possible rights of the States in their individuality. But in the general conversation of the people in public affairs, it is much more manifest. When it is a question of internal policy, you never hear it discussed, except as to how the interests of the South are to be affected. The North is looked upon with a constant jealousy. Her prosperity is considered to have been in some way obtained at the expense of the South, and there is constant reference made to the supposed efforts of Northern people to overreach the South. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred at the South talk of Northern statesmen and politicians, as only our extreme Anti-Slavery agitators represent those of the South, as cunning Yankee tricksters in politics.

Southerners are patriotic, intensely patriotic, but the South is not patriotic. The patriotism of Southerners, in proportion to its intensity, is concentrated. It centres between a man’s heels. The patriotism of the Northern people is broad and generous; it is national, and centres at Washington. I speak of patriotism as a sentiment—an interior spring of the mind, influencing its determinations independently of assignable reasons. The North feels towards the South as if it were a part of itself—honors it and glories in it, and sorrows for it and with it, as bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. The South loves the North as its business partner, and cares for its glory and success only so far as it is reflected upon itself, and accrues to the honor, safety, and wealth of itself.

The dissolution of the Union, as an economical measure, has never been conceived of by a Northern mind. The extremists of the North have urged that union with the South, under certain circumstances, made the North responsible for the iniquity of the laws of the South, growing out of its determination to sustain and perpetuate the institution of Slavery; they have, therefore, attacked the Constitution of the Union as morally wrong. They have gone further; they have declared that because it was wrong it was not binding, and they have acted consistently in this, that while they repudiate for themselves a share in the wrong, they decline to use the privileges which it confers upon them. They refuse to vote. They are politically disarmed. As a power of the North, opposed even upon moral grounds to the purposes of the South, they are practically non-combatants.

But the men of the South, who, when the North has been suspected of a disposition to restrict them in the employment of certain means of improving their property—means of doubtful constitutional integrity, of doubtful morality, and of evident national inexpediency—have advocated, and labored to effect, a secession of the Slave States. Such men suffer themselves, and are [283] suffered by others, not merely to act politically, but to occupy positions of great honor and influence.

Examine the proceedings of the Conventions of these factionists, and you will find that they are as impracticable, as fanatical, and as unfit for meddling with public affairs, as the most insane Abolitionist. They are certainly the counterparts of the extreme Anti-Slavery men of the North, except that the latter profess to be influenced by moral arguments, and they only by rage and selfishness—partriotic selfishness.

Suppose that instead of the heroic General Pierce, of New-Hampshire, the equally heroic General Pillow, of Tennessee, or General Quattlebum, of South Carolina, had been our President, would his own party in the North itself have been gratified—would anyone have thanked him for his generosity, and considered it as a peculiar expression of his love for the Union, had he chosen for his Secretary of War that very brave and talented citizen of Massachusetts, Theodore Parker? Theodore Parker has not expressed hostility to the Union more strongly than Jefferson Davis.

If a Southern President had turned out a Virginian, at a time when his severe labors were nearly approaching an honorable conclusion, and had put in his place a citizen of Ohio, who should immediately destroy a great part of the results obtained by the labor of his predecessor, the subserviency to party power in our country might let it pass without indignation ; but if the new appointee to the directorship of the Census of the United States had been the editor of the Emancipator, or even the gentlemanly, cautious and moderate Anti-Slavery editor of the National Era, no one will believe that it would have been hailed anywhere at the North as a most appropriate, suitable, and broadly patriotic appointment.

The reputation of Mr. DeBow, the present Commissioner of the Census, as an extremist of the Slavery school of politics, is not less notorious than that of Mr. Garrison or Dr. Bailey among the Anti-Slavery agitators, and his private sentiment of enmity towards the North and devotion to the peculiar interests of the South, are so strong that I have heard him spoken of by one of his friends as in a condition approaching insanity on the subject.

President Pierce, on his acquisition of office, almost immediately removed certain of the Territorial Judges in whose Courts the legality of holding slaves is expected to be tried. I think there were three such removals of Judges on what were supposed to be, of course, merely party grounds; an action of the Executive power unprecedented, with but two excusable exceptions, in the history of our Government. Suppose that the remaining Judges were all Northern men, and that the President should have proposed to fill the vacancies he had thus created with Northern men—men having a private pecuniary interest, if it were possible, in the contraction of the market for slaves, as all slaveholders have in its extension—would it have met with general approval at the North; would it have been considered at the South as a wise, suitable and [284] just proceeding? But the counterpart of this was the action of our President; and it passed entirely unnoticed at the North, and the patriotism of the South was in no way ashamed to accept it as proper and common-place.

I do not wish to dampen the patriotism of the North. I hope that love for our whole country, and a spirit of justice and severe good faith, may, if possible, be strengthened as a ruling influence in our politics, by the present excitement. But I trust that the conviction will not be lost, after the excitement occasioned by this Nebraska plot shall have subsided, that it is not safe to carry the spirit of conciliation so far as to give the ultraists of the South all those offices and opportunities for effecting their purposes which they most desire, while those of correspondingly extreme Northern views are excluded from the slightest direct political power.

Congress and the General Government will always “bear watching” in their action upon questions into which Slavery enters as an important element of consideration, for another reason, the value of which is scarcely at all appreciated at the North. No strong opposition to the designs and wishes of the South can ever have been made by individuals at the North from pecuniary considerations. Anti-Slavery principles improve no man’s property. But there is not probably a single Southern member of Congress or Cabinet Secretary or departmental functionary, who has not a direct pecuniary interest in strengthening, enlarging and perpetuating the institution of Slavery. Any vote to weaken, restrict or decrease the permanence of Slavery, given by a Southerner, must be given solely from considerations of the general good—from patriotism and in good faith, in opposition to his immediate private pecuniary interests. For example, the introduction of Slavery into Nebraska will so much enlarge the field of slave labor, as to probably increase the demand for slaves sufficiently to add 5 per cent to the value of each—in the same way that when the field of commerce was enlarged by the discovery of gold and the consequent immigration in California, the general value of ships was increased some twenty per cent. The owner of a ship of the value of $50,000 thus became $10,000 richer in a few months. The arch rowdy of our country, to gain the confidence of the South, some years since boasted in the Senate that he was the owner of a considerable number of slaves, having acquired them by his marriage. Suppose them to be one hundred in number—at the late current prices they may be considered to be of the value of $800, on an average, each. He gains then $4,000 directly, by the passage of his Nebraska bill. Indirectly, by gaining power for the general slave property interest, for future operations, his private pecuniary advantage is much greater.

I know a gentleman in Kentucky who owns nearly one hundred slaves, which pay him a very small interest on their value. He told me he would have sold them this Winter to go South, but he believed if a Slave State could be obtained on the Pacific coast, as he had reason to hope there might be in two years from this time, slave property would be increased in value nearly one hundred per cent., and he should continue his investment in that anticipation. [285] It will be evident that this gentleman could well afford to give $50,000 to effect the passage of the Nebraska bill, the ratification of the Gadsden Treaty, the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the annexation of the Walker Republic as slave territory to the United States. I know of one other Southern gentleman who makes no secret that he has spent $40,000 during the last year, in furtherance of these schemes, and considers it a good investment.

Consider the immense power which these speculators have when the patronage of the Federal Government is placed in their hands. Honorable and honest speculators and officers though they be, are they to be expected to know “no North, no South,” in the disposition of this patronage?

It is true that but a small proportion of the people of the South have this personal interest in wresting power from the North, but this small proportion have the money power, and the ignorance and stupidity of the poorer class at the South is so great that it possesses the means of almost absolute control of public opinion. It has been generally noticed by editors at the North how falsely and incompletely the newspapers with which they exchange at the South represent the public sentiment of the North on the Nebraska business. Hon. John M. Botts, of Virginia, also justly complains of this, in his letter on the subject in the National Intelligencer. It has come within my knowledge that the promise of a considerable job of work, which had been given to a poor but worthy young printer, has been lately retracted, because there was issued from his office a newspaper of small local circulation, into which articles of the Daily Times and other Northern papers, indicative of the general sentiment of the North, had been copied, though without editorial endorsement; and another printer is to have the work, because he publishes a paper in which only the views of Arnold Douglas and others of that sort have been placed before the people. Censorship of the press is a tyranny of European despotism from which we are happily exempt. “Non nobis,” etc.