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Page 2
From the beginning, it was evident that the course of slavery in the two
sections, North and South, was to be altogether divergent. In the colder
North, the dominant race found it easier to work than to compel negroes
to work: in the warmer South, the case was exactly reversed. At the
close of the Revolution, Massachusetts led the way in an abolition
of slavery, which was followed gradually by the other States north of
Virginia; and in 1787 the ordinance of Congress organizing the Northwest
Territory made all the future States north of the Ohio free States.
"Mason and Dixon's line" and the Ohio River thus seemed, in 1790, to be
the natural boundary between the free and the slave States.
Up to this point the white race in the two sections had dealt with
slavery by methods which were simply divergent, not antagonistic. It was
true that the percentage of slaves in the total population had been
very rapidly decreasing in the North and not in the South, and that the
gradual abolition of slavery was proceeding in the North alone, and that
with increasing rapidity. But there was no positive evidence that the
South was bulwarked in favor of slavery; there was no certainty but that
the South would in its turn and in due time come to the point which the
North had already reached, and begin its own abolition of slavery. The
language of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and Mason, in regard
to the evils or the wickedness of the system of slavery, was too strong
to be heard with patience in the South of after years; and in this
section it seems to have been true, that those who thought at all upon
the subject hoped sincerely for the gradual abolition of slavery in
the South. The hope, indeed, was rather a sentiment than a purpose, but
there seems to have been no good reason, before 1793, why the sentiment
should not finally develop into a purpose.
All this was permanently changed, and the slavery policy of the South
was made antagonistic to, and not merely divergent from, that of the
North, by the invention of Whitney's saw gin for cleansing cotton
in 1793. It had been known, before that year, that cotton could be
cultivated in the South, but its cultivation was made unprofitable, and
checked by the labor required to separate the seeds from the cotton.
Whitney's invention increased the efficiency of this labor hundreds of
times, and it became evident at once that the South enjoyed a practical
monopoly of the production of cotton. The effect on the slavery policy
of the South was immediate and unhappy. Since 1865, it has been found
that the cotton monopoly of the South is even more complete under a
free than under a slave labor system, but mere theory could never have
convinced the Southern people that such would be the case. Their whole
prosperity hinged on one product; they began its cultivation under slave
labor; and the belief that labor and prosperity were equally dependent
on the enslavement of the laboring race very soon made the dominant race
active defenders of slavery. From that time the system in the South was
one of slowly but steadily increasing rigor, until, just before
1860, its last development took the form of legal enactments for the
re-enslavement of free negroes, in default of their leaving the State
in which they resided. Parallel with this increase of rigor, there was a
steady change in the character of the system. It tended very steadily to
lose its original patriarchal character, and take the aspect of a purely
commercial speculation. After 1850, the commercial aspect began to be
the rule in the black belt of the Gulf States. The plantation knew only
the overseer; so many slaves died to so many bales of cotton; and the
slave population began to lose all human connection with the dominant
race.
The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 more than doubled the area of the
United States, and far more than doubled the area of the slave system.
Slavery had been introduced into Louisiana, as usual, by custom, and had
then been sanctioned by Spanish and French law. It is true that Congress
did not forbid slavery in the new territory of Louisiana; but Congress
did even worse than this; under the guise of forbidding the importation
of slaves into Louisiana, by the act of March 26, 1804, organizing
the territory, the phrase "except by a citizen of the United States,
removing into said territory for actual settlement, and being at the
time of such removal bona fide owner of such slave or slaves," impliedly
legitimated the domestic slave trade to Louisiana, and legalized slavery
wherever population should extend between the Mississippi and the
Rocky Mountains. The Congress of 1803-05, which passed the act, should
rightfully bear the responsibility for all the subsequent growth of
slavery, and for all the difficulties in which it involved the South and
the country.
There were but two centres of population in Louisiana, New Orleans and
St. Louis. When the southern district, around New Orleans, applied for
admission as the slave State of Louisiana, there seems to have been no
surprise or opposition on this score; the Federalist opposition to the
admission is exactly represented by Quincy's speech in the first volume.
When the northern district, around St. Louis, applied for admission as
the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act
of 1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States
united to resist the admission. The North controlled the House
of Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe
parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of 1820.
By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery was
forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of latitude
36� 30' (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri). The instinct
of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have been
much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission to
introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation
of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to
the district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final
conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement
of labor. But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the
balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed worth
while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time. The
topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates on
the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
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