The Feeling in the South

Southern Democrats supported Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill, introduced in January 1854, which proposed to repeal the Missouri Compromise line, thereby possibly opening the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty. The Richmond Enquirer, an influential paper, expressed the southern Democratic perspective.

“The Feeling in the South,” Richmond Enquirer, March 2, 1854, in Secession Era Editorials Project, History Department, Furman University, http://history.furman.edu/editorials/see.py?sequence=knmenu&location=Nebraska%20Bill&ecode=varekn540302a (accessed January 24, 2013).

Throughout the South there prevails a repugnance to agitation. We had enough, and too much of excitement during the Compromise controversy of 1850, and now there exists an indisposition to popular meetings and legislative resolves. But we warn the Abolitionists against a misconception of this calm and quiet temper of the public mind of the South.

There has never been a dispute between the South and its enemies in the North, which has excited so intense and universal an interest among the people of the South, as exists now in regard to the Nebraska controversy. Heretofore the struggle has been about expedients and measures of a partial and temporary character; now the issue is one of vital principle. In behalf of this principle of non-intervention, as illustrated and established in the Nebraska bill, the entire pro-slavery sentiment of the South is enlisted with all its ardor and energy. Every previous conflict was nothing more than a skirmish, in comparison with this momentous struggle between slavery and abolitionism. Heretofore, slight advantages have been lost and won, but the issue of this controversy will determine the question so essential to the interests of the South—whether slavery is to possess the vitality of an expansive and progressive institution, or be surrounded and crushed by the weight of an irresistible opposition. We are not so simple as to suppose, with some, that the passage of the Nebraska Bill will settle the matter in dispute between the North and the South. But it will do this: it will shift the theatre of the war—it will detach the Federal government from its alliance with abolitionism, and it will relieve the South of an odious and iniquitous restriction. It will place the South precisely in the position which it should occupy, in contemplation of the constitution, and it will leave the question of the expansion of slavery to be determined by its own energies and volition. It is in this light that the people of the South regard the repeal of the Missouri restriction, and it is because of its effect in vindicating the rights and enlarging the basis of slavery, that they support the measure wit such zeal and unanimity.

It is absurd to say that the South feels no concern about the issue of the Nebraska controversy, in the face of the fact that the Southern people are unanimous in support of the measure. On no former occasion of sectional controversy was this the case. It has been the misfortune of the South, that its own people have been divided in every crisis of peril to its institutions, but now, for the first time, they are thoroughly and cordially united.