December, 1860, cannot be told with correctness and life, without frequent references to the Charleston Mercury and the Charleston Courier. The Mercury especially was an index of opinion, and so vivid is its daily chronicle of events that the historian is able to put himself in the place of those ardent South Carolinians and understand their point of view."[1]
Given a man of Rhett's temperament, (his real name was Smith, which he changed to Rhett on entering Congress in 1837), one can understand the development of a local feeling of nationality; one cannot grasp as easily the reasons for the failure to see where the slave issue was leading. We have shown that there were those, here and there, who admitted that the South was falling far behind the North in the things that made for progress, but it remained for Rhett's paper,—though the article was signed by another—to suggest, a few years before the war began, a return to the barbarous practice of slave importation, a relic of the preceding century.
"There are many minds among us," said this writer, "firmly convinced that the Slave Trade is almost the only possible measure, the last resource to arrest the decline of the South in the Union. They see that it would develop resources which have slept for the great want of labor; that it would increase the area of cultivation in the South six times what it is now; that it would create a demand for land and raise its price, so as to compensate the planter for the depreciation of the slaves; that it would admit the poor white man to the advantages of our social system; that it would give him clearer interests in the country he loves now only from simple patriotism that it would strengthen our representation in Congress,
- ↑ Historical Essays, 91, 92.
