NEWS OF 150 YEARS AGO
November-December 1862
From The Missouri Democrat, Wednesday, December 10, 1862.
Why Northern Men are Called Mudsills.
The following, taken from an old number of the Mobile Herald and Tribune for 1846, shows what the North has done for the South. These Southern nabobs so heartily despised labor that they could not help looking with contempt upon the people who did so much to make their lives endurable. This is what the mudsills did for the slave aristocrats, on the testimony of one of them:
“They (the North) build our (the South) houses; they adorn them with furniture, and supply them with every comfort and convenience which we have ever desired. They educate our children, and cover our nakedness, from head to foot, with hats, coats, shoes and shirts. We eat their flour, cheese, butter, apples, codfish, potatoes, pickles, pork and onions; feed our cattle with their hay, drive their horses in their harnesses to their carriages with their whips; we walk with their sticks, ride on their saddles, write on their paper, wash with their soap, scrub with their brushes, sweep with their brooms, milk in their pails, cook in their pots, strike with their hammers, blow with their bellows, cut with their axes, sow with their seeds, reap with their hooks, pull with their leather, whitewash with their lime, paint with their paint, march by their tunes, read by their lights, drink their Congress water and rum, smoke their cigars—and, last and best of all these blessings, we marry their pretty girls, who make the best of wives.”
No doubt we shall continue to do all this and more for our Southern brethren in future; but at present we are teaching them the sacredness of law, the value of peace, the importance of free speech and a free press, and the disastrous effects of disunion and treason upon those who are deluded into conspiring against free government in the Union. If we are not much mistaken, they will be as grateful to us for these lessons, by-and-by, as the Mobile editor was for the other Northern blessings which he recounted in 1846.