_The Index_, as early as February, 1864, felt compelled to meet the phrase and in an editorial, headed "The Foul Blot," argued the error of Southern friends.

As long as they could use the word "blot" in characterization of Southern slavery, _The Index_ felt that there could be no effective British push for Southern independence and it asserted that slavery, in the sense in which England understood it, did not exist in the Confederacy.
"...

It is truly horrible to reduce human beings to the condition of cattle, to breed them, to sell them, and otherwise dispose of them, as cattle.

But is it defending such practices to say that the South does none of these things, but that on the contrary, both in theory and in practice, she treats the negro as a fellow-creature, with a soul to be saved, with feelings to be respected, though in the social order in a subordinate place, and of an intellectual organization which requires guardianship with mutual duties and obligations?
This system is called slavery, because it developed itself out of an older and very different one of that name, but for this the South is not to blame.
* * * * * "But of this the friends of the South may be assured, that so long as they make no determined effort to relieve the Southern character from this false drapery, they will never gain for it that respect, that confidence in the rectitude of Southern motives, that active sympathy, which can alone evoke effective assistance....

The best assurance you can give that the destinies of the negro race are safe in Southern hands is, not that the South will repent and reform, but that she has consistently and conscientiously been the friend and benefactor of that race.
* * * * * "It is, therefore, always with pain that we hear such expressions as 'the foul blot,' and similar ones, fall from the lips of earnest promoters of Confederate Independence.