The finest of gentlemen founded South Carolina, informants assured the famous
London Times
correspondent, William Howard Russell, upon his arrival in Charleston
in April, 1861. “It was established not by witch-burning Puritans, by
cruel persecuting fanatics, who implanted in the North the standard of
Torquemada, and breathed in the nostrils of their newly born colonies
all the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rapid intolerance of the
Inquisition,” the South Carolinians assured him, shortly after their
bombardment of Robert Anderson’s band of astoundingly brave Union men at
Fort Sumter. Confusing its own bigotry with Christianity, Puritanism
had birthed “impurity of mind among men” and “unchastity in women,”
thoroughly enveloping the New England soul, the South Carolinians
continued. Evil, corrupt, and dark, Northerners might very well “know
how to read and write, but they don’t know how to think, and they are
the easy victims of the wretched imposters on all the ‘ologies and ‘isms
who swarm over the region.”
To
a southerner, the North seemed nothing short of decadent, its freedom
not standing for anything but a loss of purpose and direction, its
people confused, running in many directions, chasing nothing of import.
“The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and
slave-holders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red
republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and
regulated freedom on the other,” a famous southern theologian, James
Henley Thornwell, had written. “In one word, the world is the
battleground, Christianity and atheism the combatants, and the progress
of humanity is at stake.”
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