RALEigh, Dec. 17, ‘60.
I can not find time to write you as often as I ought to.
To-day the Senate voted 27 to 15 to suspend the rules in
order to pass through its 2d and 3d readings a bill offered this morning by
Erwin, who is a manly disunionist, not a disunionist under the disguise of
secession, authorizing the Gov. to expend $300,000 in buying arms. The reason
given for this remarkable precipitancy is that there are reasons to fear that a
considerable insurrection is on foot, and secondly, that just now a gun
factory offers him the guns at cash prices and payment to be made in State
bonds at par. I need not say that such pretext is equally silly. The bill is made the order of the day for 12 to-morrow. It will probably
pass its second and third readings. Its real object is to enable the
Governor to arm volunteers to aid S. C. The State will soon be involved in war
unless, to the great disappointment and mortification of the leaders in this
General Assembly, the committee of 33 should make a pacification.
Cass has resigned because B. would not reinforce Ft. Moultrie.
This is the report here, fully credited. Cass is too much of a Statesman to
connive at the refusal of the President to execute the laws. Lincoln would not
be permitted to execute them.
So So. Ca. will become another Paradise—By her cotton will
rule the world—Get plenty of cheap negroes from Africa, and we may possibly be
allowed to attach ourselves to her as an humble dependency.
Slavery, as Gen. Jackson well predicted, is only a
“pretext.” Slavery is doomed if the South sets up a Southern Confederacy. With
Canada in effect for her Northern border from the Atlantic to the Pacific—all
hating us, it is madness to think of anything else only to cut the throats of the
negroes or have our own throats cut.
I am truly sorry that I am a member of this Assembly which I
think contains less of patriotism than any like number of men ever assembled in
this State since the close of the Revolution.
Nearly half of the Democratic members desire to preserve the
Union, but they are the rank and file and will all ultimately follow their
leaders—at least, vote for the measures of Avery and Co.—all of which, openly
or in disguise, look to a dissolution.
SOURCE: J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Editor, The Correspondence of
Jonathan Worth, Volume 1, p. 126-7
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