"The foundations of our new Government are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that Slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth."
And again:
"The delusion of the equality of races cannot be traced in any of the component parts of the Southern Constitution. In that instrument we solemnly discard the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians that all men of all races are equal, and make African inequality and the equality of white men the chief corner-stone of the Southern Republic. With a Government so founded, the world has yet to see in us the model nation of history."
Putting aside all considerations of justice or morality -- which it is hardly permitted seriously to take into account in such an argument -- it must be confessed there attaches a certain theoretical interest to this new doctrine of the social compact. For the first time in the history of human societies, a nation's existence is made to turn on the pivot of an ethnological hypothesis.