POLITICAL VERSUS LITERARY AMBITIONS.--The natural ambition of the southern
gentleman was political. The South was proud of its famous orators and
generals in Revolutionary times and of its long line of statesmen and
Presidents, who took such a prominent part in establishing and maintaining
the republic. We have seen (p. 68) that Thomas Jefferson of Virginia wrote
one of the most memorable political documents in the world, that James
Madison, a Virginian President of the United States, aided in producing the
_Federalist_ papers (p. 71), that George Washington's _Farewell Address_
(p. 100) deals with such vital matters as morality almost entirely from a
political point of view. Although the South produced before the Civil War a
world-famous author in Edgar Allan Poe, her glorious achievements were
nevertheless mainly political, and she especially desired to maintain her
former reputation in the political world. The law and not literature was
therefore the avenue to the southerner's ambition.
Long before the Civil War, slavery became an unusually live subject. There
was always some political move to discuss in connection with slavery; such,
for instance, as the constitutional interpretation of the whole question,
the necessity of balancing the admission of free and slave states to the
Union, the war with Mexico, the division of the new territory secured in
that conflict, the right of a state to secede from the Union.
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