An editorial in today’s Charleston Mercury is read with approval by many white Baptists in the South Carolina city:
… we have already noticed the gross ignorance of the people of the North in regard to the true principles of republican government. Having no adequate conception of those wise and needful restrictions upon absolute power, whether vested in one man or many, by which alone the rights and liberty of all are protected, they substitute for free government a many headed tyranny, shifting, irresponsible and limitless, and hence are utterly unfit for political connection under a common government with those who would avoid mobocracy, agrarianism and anarchy.
In addition to their false and low views of republican government, we have spoken of the error of their idea of a general government for a confederation of republics. They mistake the creature for the creator—the agent for the supreme ultimate authority, and would make a consolidate nation, with unlimited power, out of a union of States, under a compact of powers, carefully delegated. They are, therefore, most dangerous confederates for those who would avoid a central despotism and escape the troubles and difficulties of another moral struggle with such anti-States rights tendencies.
Besides their mobocratic and consolidate political heresies, we have alluded to the radical hostility of the Northern people to the South and her institutions, in the great, vital question of slavery. Anti-slavery is a sentiment and a doctrine so thoroughly embedded in their moral, religious and political nature, that its eradication within many generations is a hopeless expectation. Hence they cannot but be domestic foes, aliens, and unsafe confederates for those in this section who would live in peace, beyond the reach of such inimical influences.
Source: “Admission of Northern States into the Southern Confederation,” Charleston Mercury, March 28, 1861 (link)
