"African Slavery has not only become one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern States, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property-- worth, according to recent estimates, not less than four thousand millions of dollars; forming, in fact, the basis upon which rests the prosperity and wealth of most of these States, and supplying the commerce of the world with its richest freights, and furnishing the manufactories of two continents with the raw material, and their operatives with bread. It is upon this gigantic interest, this peculiar institution of the South, that the Northern States and their people have been waging an unrelenting and fanatical war for the last quarter of a century. An institution with which is bound up, not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community. This war has been waged in every way that human ingenuity, urged on by fanaticism, could suggest. They attack us through their literature, in their schools, from the hustings, in their legislative halls, through the public press, and even their courts of justice forget the purity of their judicial ermine, to strike down the rights of the Southern slave-holder, and over-ride every barrier which the Constitution has erected for his protection; and the sacred desk is desecrated to this unholy crusade against our lives, our property, and the Constitutional rights"

Hale was Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky. A native of the Bluegrass State, Hale had moved to Alabama in 1837 and set up a law practice. He also served intermittently in the state legislature. Since the Kentucky legislature was not in session when Hale visited the state on December 26th, 1860, he fulfilled his charge as a commissioner by writing the following letter to Gov. Magoffin. Hale served as the lieutenant colonel of the 11th Alabama and died leading a charge at the Battle of Gaines Mill.)
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Oh, there is nothing simple about it all, but the Southern folk had a lot at stake in slavery, and again I ask, "without slavery, would there have been a war?" There were always economic problems and disagreements between the Southern and Northern States. but when a political party like the Republican party came talking abolition, the southern slave states took serious notice.

Kevin Dally