Chap. I.

nowhere more active than here, assists this tendency; for it destroys the barriers raised by distance, promotes intercommunication, quickens the diffusion of thought, brings large areas under easy control, facilitates the transaction of business on a great scale, and opens many upward and converging roads to personal ambition. Nowhere, again, are the advantages of belonging to a great State more keenly realized; perhaps they are nowhere felt with equal keenness; and it is natural that this should be so. Rapid aggrandizement is the strongest of all incentives to national pride, and there are motives, more solid than national pride, which may well lead an American to desire earnestly that the United States should always continue to be the greatest Power on the American Continent.

The loosely compacted structure of the Commonwealth has at the same time served to protect it against risks to which it would otherwise have been exposed. The pressure of the common Government has been almost unfelt, and the strain upon its powers of administration has been slight, since these powers are contracted in themselves, though exercised over an immense area. It is not at Washington, not from Washington, that the American people are practically governed. There could be little to provoke that impatient desire for independence which springs from a sense of neglect or oppression so long as each State raised its own taxes, made and administered its own laws. Local interests and passions, which might have kindled into flame if brought into collision in a single representative assembly gathered from places so remote from each other, had their own spheres of activity assigned to them elsewhere. Lastly, the process by which new States are formed as population spreads over vacant territory has in it somewhat of the smoothness and regularity of natural growth, and is well devised to satisfy as early as possible the settler's craving for self-government, whilst keeping unbroken the ties of attachment to the Union.

Rarely, therefore, until of late years, have American statesmen suffered themselves to harbour any misgiving as to the permanence and stability of the Union. Nor was this confidence unreasonable. It might well be judged improbable that any serious attempt would be made to sever the tie which bound the States together. It was certain that any such attempt, if made, could proceed from only one cause,-a violent conflict of interest or of sentiment, or both, and that conflict sectional, defined by a geographical line, and arming large portions of the Commonwealth against each other. It appeared certain also that such an attempt, however and wherever it might originate, would be strenuously resisted.

This improbable event, however, took place; the conflict actually arose; and, within the lifetime of men born before the ratification of the Constitution, the Union was torn by an extensive revolt, followed by a civil war the greatest and most sanguinary that the world has ever seen. I am about to retrace briefly the causes and the approach of this tremendous calamity; the growth within the United States of a powerful and compact slavery interest; the localisation of it in the South; the rise in the North of interests and sentiments hostile to slavery; and the circumstances under which, on the part of the South, suspicion and estrangement deepened into fear and animosity, and animosity finally broke into

war.

Slavery and free labour cannot thrive together: each has a tendency to encroach upon and destroy the other, and the issue of the contest is determined by the conditions under which it is carried on. Where, as in newly settled countries, mere labour in its rudest form is very scarce and very profitable, the temptation to procure slaves is strong; beyond the first cost of the slave and his bare subsistence, all the profits of his work are reaped by his owner, who secures at the same time a steady supply, and is relieved from the necessity of bargaining

Chap. I..

Chap. I.

for the services of freemen on their own terms.1 Under ordinary circumstances, however, the superior workman, who toils for his own profit, must, where the competition is possible, drive out and supersede the inferior, who drudges to avoid punishment; and to the habits of a large, free, and industrious population, slavery as an institution soon becomes distasteful and odious. But where slavery has once become firmly established, it opposes, by the very fact of its existence and by the condition of society which it tends to create, a barrier, hard to surmount, against such competition. The business, it has been observed, in which slaves are generally engaged, be it what it may, soon becomes debased in public estimation. In a country filled with slaves, labour belongs to the slave, and degrades the freeman.

In the American Colonies south of the Potomac, negro slavery, once introduced, took root and spread rapidly. In the wooded uplands which cover a large part of these countries the climate is generally temperate and the soil of moderate fertility; but they contain near the coast, and along the banks of rivers, great tracts of flat and rich land on which rice, cotton, and tobacco grow luxuriantly, which yield a lavish return to very rude labour, and to the tillage of which negroes, from their capacity of enduring heat, were well adapted. The great rice-grounds of South Carolina were thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century, brought into cultivation entirely by gangs of slaves, largely outnumbering the scanty white population which dwelt among them. There were here also greater inequalities of condition than in the North: the settled parts of Virginia, especially the tide-water districts, were mostly held in large estates, and throughout the four Southern Colonies the pursuits

1 The earlier settlers in the Indiana Territory (now Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) made repeated but fruitless efforts between 1803 and 1807 to obtain from Congress a temporary suspension of the prohibition of slavery within that Territory.

of the people were almost exclusively agricultural and Chap. I. pastoral.1

Yet it has been reasonably doubted whether even in these regions negro slavery would have been able to make head against the immigration from Europe which their great natural advantages were calculated to attract, but for the stimulus given to the production of cotton by the improvements introduced almost simultaneously in America and England into the processes of cleaning the raw fibre for exportation, and of manufacturing it into yarn and cloth. Whitney's saw-gin, the simple invention of a man of rare mechanical genius, raised the exportation in one year from 187,000 lbs. to nearly eight times as much. American cotton, which up to 1793 was almost unknown in the markets of Europe, had in a few years secured a monopoly of them; and the value of land and labour suitable to cotton rose with the rising demand of those markets.2 From the immense consumption of cotton fabrics, and the steady flow of

1 The number of slaves south of the Potomac in 1754 is estimated by Mr. Bancroft at 178,000, against 71,000 in the middle and northern colonies.-History of the American Revolution, vol. i, p. 146.

The Census of 1790 gives the following results :

2 In 1784 it is recorded that eight bags shipped to England were seized at the Custom-house as fraudulently entered, "cotton not being a production of the United States." The export of 1790, as returned, was 81 bags.-Greeley's American Conflict, p. 58. The quantity imported here from the United States in 1793 was 187,000 lbs. against an import (in the previous year) of 28,706,675 lbs. from other parts of the world.— Ellison's Slavery and Secession in America, p. 14.

Chap. I.

British capital into the trade, the demand has more than kept pace with the supply.

Lancashire was the great workshop to which the cotton-grower sent his produce. Lancashire, dusky with smoke and covered with populous towns, represents to our eyes the growth of the industry by which its looms have been fed; and Lancashire manufacturers, especially of late years, have been tempted to build mills faster than the price of the raw material would enable them to work at a profit. In the five years ending with 1850 the total quantity of raw cotton consumed in the United States and exported was 4,578,598,117 lbs., and the average price from 8 to 9 cents; in the five years ending with 1860 the quantity was 8,403,993,782 lbs., and the average price from 11 to 12 cents. The consequence was that, as the Lancashire manufacturer multiplied his spindles and increased his business, so the planter spent all that he could afford in buying land and slaves. It was roughly computed that the rise of a cent in the price of cotton added a hundred dollars to the value of an average field-hand. Negroes were bred for sale where they could not be employed in large numbers on the soil. All domestic service was performed by them, and, throughout the greater part of the South, every kind of unskilled labour; they were employed in the fisheries and turpentine woods of North Carolina, as lumbermen in the South Carolina swamps, and as ordinary farm-labourers on the wheat and clover fields of Eastern Virginia. Of the entire mass of property, real and personal, in the Southern States, more than one-half in estimated value consisted of negro slaves;1 and, since they constituted the whole available stock

1 The Census of 1860 gives 3,953,760 as the total number of negro slaves in the Slave States. Of these 3,404,373 were held in those States south of the Potomac. An "average field-hand" was computed, at the time of Mr. Olmsted's Journeys, to be worth 500 dollars, but this, in his opinion, was below the mark. The price had certainly risen before