In what would have been more accurately entitled, The Yankee, this fiery polemic exposes the perfidious character of the political and religious fanaticism which had waged a war of attrition against the South from the earliest days of the federal Union. Beginning with the persecuting intolerance of their unsettled Puritan forefathers, the author enumerates the long train of abuses of power and violation of the rights of others which have characterized a certain class of the New England people from their earliest settlements in the New World to the outbreak of the War Between the States, calling for the proverbial raising of the black flag in the South's then-current attempt to drive the Northern invader from her soil.