Racism in the Antebellum South (Pt. 4 of 9)

(Cont. from Part 3) And, not to beat the point into the ground here, but on p. 24 of that same link is a statement made by Mississippi secession commissioner Fulton Anderson to the secession convention in Virginia in Feb. 1861, in which he says of the alleged intentions of the Republican Party:

Under the false pretence of restoring the government to the original principles of its founders, but in defiance and contempt of those principles, it avowed its purpose to take possession of every department of power, executive, legislative and judicial, to employ them in hostility to our institutions. By a corrupt exercise of the power of appointment to office, it proposed to pervert the judicial power from its true end and purpose, that of defending and preserving the Constitution, to be the willing instrument of its purposes of wrong and oppression. In the meantime it proposed to disregard the decisions of that august tribunal [i.e., the Dred Scott decision], and by the exertion of barefaced power, to exclude slavery from the public Territory, the common property of all the States, and to abolish the internal slave trade between the States acknowledging the legality of that institution.

It proposed further to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and in all places within the Territory of the several States, subject under the Constitution to the jurisdiction of Congress, and to refuse hereafter under all circumstances, admission into the Union of any State with a Constitution recognizing the institution of slavery.

Having thus placed the institution of slavery, upon which rests not only the whole wealth of the Southern people, but their very social and political existence, under the condemnation of a government established for the common benefit, it proposed in the future, to encourage immigration into the public Territory, by giving the public land to immigrant settlers, so as, within a brief time, to bring into the Union free States enough to enable it to abolish slavery within the States themselves.

(Cont. in Part 4)