Diary of Henry Greville: Saturday, March 30, 1861

In a letter I received a few days ago from Fanny Kemble from New York, she says: I suppose if I had been in Boston, I should have heard something like sorrow and mortification expressed for the present disastrous state of the country, but though there is a good deal of excited curiosity here, and commencement of financial anxiety, there does not appear to me to be one particle of genuine patriotic feeling.

The fact is, the material prosperity of the nation has made the people base. They want, and God will send it to them, the salvation of adversity. Olmsted, whose books, by the bye, are the best, the only good authority about the Slave States, dined with me at Mr. Field's the other day, and said the Southern people were really nothing but a collection of children and savages. He, and indeed everybody, the Southerners themselves, consider the secession, if it produces civil war, as the inevitable ruin of the South, and a good deal of the same conviction has hitherto tempered the anger of the North at the folly of their suicidal proceedings, and though one of the oldest and wealthiest of the Boston merchants said the other day (speaking of the Cotton States), "Thank God they are gone, pray that they may never come back," and so speaking spoke the mind of the majority of Massachusetts men, nobody can doubt what one of the Southern men openly declared in the Peace Convention, that civil war would be utter ruin to them, because of their slaves.

SOURCE: Alice Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 364-5