Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Speech of T. L. Clingman, of North Carolina, in Defence of the South Against the Aggressive Movements of the North: Delivered in the House of Representatives, January 22, 1850
Sir, the force and extent of the present anti-slavery movement of the North is not understood by the South. Until within the last few months, I had supposed that even if California and New Mexico should come in as free States, the agitation would subside so as to produce no further action. A few months' travel in the interior of the North has changed my Opinion. Such is' now the condition of public sentiment there, that the making of the Mexican territory all free, in any mode, would be re garded as an anti-slavery triumph, and would accelerate the general movement against us. It is not difficult to perceive how that state of public sentiment has been produced there. The old abolition societies have done a good deal to poison the popular mind. By circulating an immense number of in?ammatory pamphlets, filled with all manner of falsehood and calumny against the South, its institutions, and its men, because there was no contradiction in that quarter, they had created ahigh degree of prejudice against us. As soon as it became probable that there would be an ao quisition of territory, the question at once became a great practical one, and the po liticians immediately took the matter in hand. With a View at once of strengthen ing their position, they seized upon all this matter which the abolition societie's (whose aid both parties courted in the struggle) had furnished from time to time, and diffused and strengthened it as much as possible, and thereby created an immense amount of hostility to southern institutions. Everything there contributes to this movement; candidates are brought out by the caucus system, and if they fail to take that sectional ground which is deemed strongest there, they are at once discarded. The mode of nominating candidates, as well as of conducting the canvass, is de structive of anything like independence in the representative. They do not, as gen tlemen often do in the South and West, take ground against the popular clamor, and sustain themselves by direct appeals to the intelligence and reason of their constitu ents. Almost the whole of the northern press co-operated in the movement, with the exception of the New York Herald, (which, with its large circulation, published matter on both sides, ) and a few other liberal papers, everything favorable to the South has been carefully excluded from the northern papers. By these combined efi'orts, a degree of feeling'and prejudice has been gotten up against the South, Which is most intense in all the interior.
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