of unskilled labour, they were necessary to support the value of the other half. "In a slave-holding State," wrote Mr. Cobb, of Georgia, "the greatest evidence of wealth in the planter is the number of his slaves. The most desirable property for a remunerative income is slaves. The best property to leave to his children, from which they will part with the greatest reluctance, is slaves." "If," said Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, in 1858, speaking in the Senate of the United States, "if you search closely, you will find that there is no man living in the Southern States, not excepting the Federal office-holder, but that the labour of the negro contributes the chief supply to that fund from which he derives his gains. There is no property here which does not derive from it its chief value. To the labour of the negro, under the white man's superintendence and control, we owe nine-tenths of the products of the soil, the whole of the cotton, sugar, and rice crops, three-fourths of the tobacco, hemp, and grain crops, and a large part of the products of the forest. These are not all, but we will specify no more! For the most part the field of the white man's industry begins where the labour of the negro ends. That which has been produced must be turned to account. We need but look at our railroads and steam-boats to see how many white men make their living by bringing to market that which they themselves have not produced, and could not produce. Our towns are crowded with those who find their sole occupation in the receipt, transfer, and sale of these same products of negro labour, and in the trade which springs from its exchange for other commodities. The towns themselves have no other origin than the facilitating of this exchange." The four million persons (in round numbers) thus held in servitude within the Southern States, were not only slaves but people of a distinct race-a race marked Chap. I. Chap. I. by strong physical characteristics, which in the eyes of their white masters branded them with an indelible stamp of inferiority and degradation. This circumstance, while it made the negro's condition hopeless, and himself an object less for the sympathy we owe to our fellowcreatures than for the capricious humanity which men bestow on the brute creation, was a bond of union, which might with opportunity become a dangerous one, among the slaves themselves. They were for the most part extremely ignorant; and to the defects peculiar to the negro character were added in them the animal habits and incapacity for forethought and self-control which slavery almost necessarily engenders. But, though degraded, they had the power, which brutes have not, of combination and of receiving and communicating ideas; and they lived in a country fenced round by no natural barriers, and in more or less close neighbourhood to a population who, without much sympathy for the slave himself, detested slavery, and amongst whom therefore, should they escape, their owners could reckon on no willing assistance in recovering them. It was a natural effect, then, of negro slavery as it existed in America, not only to breed in the Southern people habits of life unlike those of their Northern fellow-countrymen, and a distinct type of character which had in it somewhat of pride and imperiousness, but in the conduct of public affairs to keep alive in them a constant sense of insecurity. The Southerner was never without a forecast of possible danger. All that he had, and the safety of all whom he held dear, depended on his being able to keep a multitude of human beings, belonging to an alien race, in the condition of chattels, and to maintain an institution assailable from within and from without, which had perished everywhere else except in Cuba and Brazil, and which he knew to be discredited and condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world. He accus tomed himself to impute this insecurity to the machinations of Northern abolitionists; but no machinations were necessary to produce it, and it had in fact existed long before the anti-slavery sentiment woke into activity in the Northern States. The very fact that opinion was against him, that he was a mark for reproach which he thought undeserved, and that this opinion was largely shared by his own countrymen, disposed him to assert and defend his rights with somewhat of that acerbity and tenacity which belong to party spirit. He knew also that the property he held was, even while it continued his own, liable to depreciation from other causes; for the value of slave-labour, which is always, in the gross, labour of an inferior sort, diminishes fast with the diminishing productiveness of the land to which it is applied. The strength of these feelings has been sometimes exaggerated by anti-slavery writers, but it is impossible not to see that they largely influenced-nay, they may be said to have ruled the action of the Southern Legislatures in their internal Government, and that of Southern members in the Federal Congress. To ward off not only every attack, but every approach, of the anti-slavery sentiment, to protect, and if possible increase, the political influence of the slave-holding interest in the public councils, and to enlarge its territorial dominion,—these were the objects which the South during a long course of years kept steadily in view and pursued with remarkable tenacity of purpose. - The sterner climate and less kindly soil of the Northern States, which yield no return, unless to thrifty and persevering labour, made slave-holding there unprofitable, and it soon became repugnant to the temper and habits of the people. It was abolished or prohibited altogether by the State Constitutions of Vermont and New Hampshire, and by the new Constitution framed in 1780 for Massachusetts; and Emancipation Acts, gradual in their operation, were passed between 1770 and 1804 Chap. I. Chap. I. by Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. The handful of slaves which existed there they are supposed to have been about 50,000 in 1790-died out: the tide of emigration from Europe poured, slowly at first, but with increasing volume, through the Northern ports, spread over the seaboard States, and rolled westwards; and a vast population grew up, of more than average intelligence, passionately fond of freedom, keenly sensitive to opinion, and impatient of anything like national discredit. A strong hostility to slavery always existed in the North and West, though it did not, till a comparatively recent date, become an active element in the politics of the Union. On the reasons which prevented this I need not dwell; it is enough to say that, so long as slavery remained a mere matter of State legislation, it was practically shut out from the arena of political controversy. The Constitution, by giving Congress no control over it, placed it beyond the reach of interference, and no attempt to meddle with it unconstitutionally would have been countenanced by public opinion. Questions might, however, arise, strictly within the domain of Congress, which, without directly jeopardizing the institution itself, might embroil the interests of the Slave States with those of the Free, and widen the chasm between them. Three such questions arose, of very unequal importance-one relating to the admission of new States and the organization of Territories, a second to the recovery of fugitive slaves, and a third to the commercial policy of the Union. I. To understand the magnitude of the first of these questions, and the frequency with which it was liable to 1 Slavery in New York finally ceased in 1827, under the operation of an Act passed in 1817. This Act set free 10,000 slaves. A gradual Emancipation Act had been passed as early as 1799. At the date of the Census of 1840 there were still 674 slaves in New Jersey, which had passed an Act in 1804.-Greeley's American Conflict, p. 108. Negro slaves existed in Massachusetts as early as 1638.-Curtis, History of the Constitution of the United States, vol. ii, p. 454. recur, we have only to glance at any old map of the Chap. I. United States side by side with a map of the present day. The American Republic at its formation occupied but a narrow strip of its present wide dominion. Of the chain of States which now divide the valley of the Mississippi, and of those which border the lakes west of Lake Erie, not one was then in existence. Between the left bank of the river and the present confines of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, lay a great expanse of wild land, thinly settled here and there, and roamed over by the Creek and Cherokee Indians. This now forms the States of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee. West of the great stream, from its sources to its mouth, and from its banks as far at least as the chain of the Rocky Mountains, and embracing also the seaboard between New Orleans and Mobile, extended the old French dominion of Louisiana, then a dependency of Spain, and uninhabited except at a few points where small settlements had been formed. West Florida, Texas, and the whole range of plain and highland stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, were also Spanish. Oregon was an unexplored wilderness. All these immense regions have by degrees been organised as Territories, and from Territories erected into States; each step has called into action the powers of Congress; and the question whether slavery should be admitted into, or excluded from, section after section of this new domain, has given rise to repeated and violent struggles. It has been insisted, on the one hand, that the soil of the Territories, being held by the common Government of the Union in trust for all the States, must be deemed common ground, in which all the States had equal rights; that all citizens indiscriminately had the right of settling there; that the right to settle was incomplete unless the settler could carry his property along with him; that Congress had by the Constitution no power to exclude from the Territories any species of property; that no such power could be |