What is more, for the men who were fighting the battles of the slave power, slavery had little real influence, and that influence was unquestionably deadened by the fact that the very breath of the institution of journalism was freedom. Their bitter denunciations of those northern politicians and fanatical abolitionists,—who wished, they declared, to rob them of their property,—concealed in many a case the heavy sense of impending doom.
Although the South claimed to be wealthier than the North, its people were fast being confronted on all sides with evidences that, commercially, the North was leaving them far behind. Little as the local southern editors wished to call attention to this fact, they were frequently obliged to do so, in order to stir their constituents. In the early fifties the Whig, of Vicksburg, Mississippi, complained that the Mississippi Legislature had been obliged, not only to send its session laws to Boston to be printed, but to appropriate $3,000 to pay one of its members to go there and read proofs. "What a commentary on the Yankee-hater!"—A little later, the Greensboro' Patriot criticized the legislature of North Carolina for doing the same thing, adding, "It is a little humiliating that no work except the commonest labor can be done in North Carolina; that everything which requires a little skill, capital, or ingenuity, must be sent North."[1]
For twenty years preceding the war, the fact was evident that the northern papers were steadily becoming more comprehensive in their scope and more complete in every department, and that they were enlisting more talent than were those at the South. It was the complaint of the southerner. Helper, that "the very highest literary ability in finances, in political economy, in science,
- ↑ Helper, The Impending Crisis, 391.
