An editorial in the Richmond Daily Dispatch is prescient, in a way. There would indeed eventually be an influx of immigrants from the North, but not to a victorious independent Confederacy. I’m also not sure to what extent the immigrants brought “brown paper sole shoes” and “free love”.
The danger to the South.The greatest evil which the South has to apprehend in the future is the vast immigration from the United States and other foreign countries, especially the former, which will be poured upon our shores. When Forney, of the Philadelphia Press, declared that it would be true economy in the North to spend a hundred millions a year rather than permit the South to be independent, he did not over-estimate the annual commercial and manufacturing value of the South to the Northern States. Indeed, the immense expenditures and efforts making to compel us to remain in the Union, and minister to the wealth and power of the sordid, selfish and vulgar money lords of the Northers cities, demonstrate irresistibly that, without the South, the North is commercially involved, and her great cities in the midst of condacious aspirations are hopelessly paralyzed in trade and commerce.
They themselves admit the fact; they no longer so much as attempt to conceal that the “poor, barren, sandy South” is full of jewels which have made them rich, and without which, they become penniless and bankrupt. This is the reason, and the only reason, why New York, never an abolition city, has surpassed even the Western Reserve of Ohio in her lury against the South. But whilst all this is undeniably true, it is equally evident that, as soon as Peace is accomplished, and the independence of the South secured, these very classes, the commercial and manufacturing, which have furnished the sinews of the present war, which have surpassed the most rabid abolitionists in their bloody demonstrations against the South, which have raised regiments like Billy Wilson’s, and held up before them the prize of “Beauty and Booty,” will make another movement of invasion compared with which those now threatening our borders are comparatively harmless, and forsaking the sinking ships of the Northern cities, will swarm like locusts in our Southern marts, grasping every department of business and trade, and reaping in their own pockets the manufacturing and commercial harvest which is sure to follow the Southern blood and treasure which they have caused to flow like water in this great cause.
It is clear as day; nobody now denies its that with the independence of the South, the commercials sceptre passes from the North, and with that sceptre, mark the prediction, will pass by tens of thousands and by hundreds of thousands those who have hitherto acknowledged allegiance to it. Where the carcase is, the eagles will be gathered together.–Hitherto the emigration from North to South has been a mere drop in the bucket compared with that from the North to the West, and has not been as large even as that from the South to the North. But we shall see a very different state of things when the South holds out rich rewards to manufacturing and commercial enterprise. Unless measures are adopted by the Congress and Legislatures of the Confederate States to meet this new invasion, our own people will lose all the fruits of the war; their institutions will be endangered, and, what is worse than all, the purity and simplicity of Southern character placed in perilous contact with the sordid and corrupt influences which overgrown wealth has engendered in Northern society.
This subject is really one of the most serious and vital that can possibly engage the attention of Southern statesmen. Our Southern civilization will be infinitely more endangered by such an inroad than by a million of armed men. As enemies, we fear them not; as professed friends, with trade in view, heaven deliver us. We have no need of them, or of anything they have — their brown paper sole shoes, their wooden buckets, their hollow philosophy, their sanguinary religion, their Spiritualism, Mormonism, Free Love or Abolitionism. We can get every article we need of clothing, household and agricultural wares, and in every department of business, from England and France, and these articles will be made in workmanlike fashion, by people who have not learned to think it a mark of smartness and a subject of gratulation to rob your neighbor.–But, unless naturalization laws are passed of the most stringent kind, the Northern emigration will not only monopolize trade and commerce, but will commence, at the ballot-box, an insidious war upon our institutions, and by the aid of corrupt and aspiring demagogues, who will court their influence, will undermine the system of slavery in what were called the Border Slave States, and prepare the way to cultivate them entirely by Northern labor,
It is for the Confederate Congress, and the Legislatures of the South to throw up carthworks against this, the greatest of all dangers which menaces the South.–The right of suffrage should never be extended by any slave community which properly appreciates that right, and has any solicitude for the preservation of slave institutions, to any emigrant from the Northern Abolition States of America.