But slavery was highly profitable in some parts of the South; slightly profitable in others; self-sustaining practically in all parts. The slave in the cotton-field paid; the slave in the rice-field paid; the slave in the sugar-cane paid; the slave in the tobacco-field paid; and it was profitable to breed slaves for the market. There were many plantations and small farms worked by slave labor which were not profitable, just as at the North there were farms by means of which the owners managed to run themselves into debt; there were plantations at the South which merely held their own, maintaining for the owner a degree of comfort which satisfied him; and there were innumerable households in villages and towns in which the domestic service was performed by slaves, with no thought on the part of the owners either of loss or gain. The characteristic of the Southern people was not the love of money, nor self-sacrifice to obtain it yet, touching slavery, all classes of whites at the South agreed. The imperious will of slavocracy brooked no difference of opinion on slavery; no man could live comfortably in any part of the South and be a known opponent of slavery. Opposition, even of a mild type, imperilled the institution, imperilled the safety of almost inestimable wealth in slave property: and when wealth in any form is put in peril, men are ready to shoulder a musket and fight for what they believe to be their own. Sifted down to its ultimate element, the slavery question was a property question, or expressed in another way, a labor and industrial question. Men must live, either by their own or another's labor: but "Skin upon skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life." Therefore the South fought for slavery.

The supremacy of the South in the government did not cease with the retirement of Andrew Jackson from the presidency in 1837; it continued through the administration of Martin Van Buren, his political heir and successor; through the administrations of Tyler and Polk, of Franklin Pierce and of James Buchanan, meeting with no interruption, save the brief tenure of Harrison, and the equivocal

administration of Millard Fillmore. From the inauguration of Washington to the inauguration of Lincoln, a period of seventy-one years, fifteen men served in the office of president and of these eleven were of Southern birth and Van Buren was "a Northern man with Southern sentiments." Of all the presidents from Washington to Lincoln not one stood for an anti-slavery policy, or for a policy distinctively favoring the limitation of slavery. And their attitude reflected the prevailing opinion of the American people in their time. Slavery, however much its existence was regretted here and there by individuals, and the list included slaveholders like Washington and Jefferson-was accepted by Americans as an established institution and under the guardianship and protection of the Constitution and the laws. Slavery profited by that spirit of conservatism which regulates the conduct of men of English stock and of most men who live under the sky of English traditions. The growth of the slave power must be attributed therefore not to the ambition, the cupidity, the greed, or the callous morals of the South but to the American people as a whole, who, North and South, tolerated it, encouraged it, thought for it, and profited by it.

It follows from this fact that slavery, indefensible and wasteful, immoral, undesirable as it is in itself, was not, could not be the sole cause of the Civil War unless at some critical moment it should become an issue between the two sections of the Union, all its defenders ranging against all its enemies; or, by allying itself with other issues over which hostile feelings existed, should precipitate civil war. So long as a large, almost dominating portion of the North allied itself with the South in support of slavery, or, in a negative way practically warded off hostile attempts against it, slavery was bound to continue till, by exhaustion of the soil on which it lived and of attainable areas of new territory, it should perish: or, responding to the appeals of its enemies, the slaveholders should abolish it by common consent. If, at a critical moment in the Nation's life, the conviction should dominate that the Nation could no longer

exist with slavery, then its doom would be sealed and the day of its disappearance would dawn. But so long as slavery transformed itself into millions of bales of cotton to the great profit of the cotton planter, and the world demanded yet more cotton; so long as slavery by its three-fifths "slave vote" was a political force; so long as its allies at the North helped to make its extension possible and guarded it with a jealousy hardly second to that of the slaveholders themselves; so long as it was identified with the conceptions of morality and civilization of the entire South containing more than eight millions of the white race, the masters of nearly four millions of the black race-so long would it write constitutions, enact laws and hand down judicial decisions in its own behalf. Though of itself it might not precipitate civil war in America, it might become so identified with the ambitions and passions of men, with their concepts of government and civil administration, that all other differences between political parties, moralists, economists and plain people might seem merged in slavery so that it should embody the fatal issue which should determine the destiny of the Republic.

It is easy to form opinions hostile to slavery now, many years after its abolition, and it is equally easy to be amazed that the institution ever found defenders; but to understand the causes of the Civil War, it is necessary to place the mind back in the atmosphere of slavery times; to attempt to look at slavery as men then looked at it, North and South; to follow the institution in all its entanglements with law and politics, with religion, with social economy, with American life at every point. The institution of slavery as a compelling power in American affairs, however immoral, however violative of a true economy, social, political or industrial, shaped the course of those affairs as imperiously as the feudal system under the old régime shaped the course of affairs in France: the one precipitated the French Revolution; the other, the Civil War in America. Shortly before the French Revolution, Arthur Young visited France and described what he saw in his Travels in France. The

condition of the French people as he describes it seems beyond the power of belief, yet we know that he wrote truly. Shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted travelled throughout the South and described what he saw in his Texas Journey, The Seaboard Slave States, A Journey in the Back Country, and The Cotton Kingdom. He, too, wrote of an old régime-the régime of slavery, and it seems to-day almost impossible for us to conceive that this régime ever existed in America. He who attempts to understand the French Revolution must first understand that of which Young writes and he who attempts to understand the Civil War must first understand that of which Olmsted writes. "Both wrote on the eve of a great convulsion," remarks the historian Rhodes; "one was the greatest historical event of the eighteenth century, and the other will probably be adjudged the greatest of the nineteenth century."

While by the Dred Scott decision no portion of the United States could lawfully be closed against slavery—the slaveholder by that decision having the right to take his property with him into any portion of the Union and there to demand its protection-yet at the very moment of this decision in 1857 slavery was confined to the South, that is, to the States between Mason and Dixon's line, the Ohio River, Iowa and Kansas, on the north, Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico, on the south; and between the Atlantic seaboard and the region acquired from Mexico by the treaty of 1848. The Indian tribes held slaves in Indian territory, and there were slaves in Arizona and New Mexico, organized in 1850, under the Compromise of that year, as the Territory of New Mexico. The portion of the United States actually occupied by slavery did not exceed thirty per cent of the national domain. The South, as an agricultural region, consisted of two parts a highland portion comprising Virginia, North Carolina and the States directly westward; a lowland portion comprising the remainder. The products of the highland region, grain, hay, tobacco, were the same as the products of southern Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, Indiana

and Illinois, where white men did the labor, whence the conclusion that white men could do the like labor in these border and more northern slave States. The South of the lowlands was the region which produced rice, cotton and sugar, where white men cannot endure to labor as can negroes. In the upper South slave labor cost more than free labor in New Jersey, Pennsylvania or New York: the actual cost being determined by the amount of labor of an effective kind which the slave performed. Judged by this standard, one free laborer in New Jersey accomplished as much in one day as four slaves in Virginia. The ratio was true of Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland and the hill country of North Carolina and even the mountainous parts of northern Georgia. In the rice swamps, the cotton fields, the canebrakes, where only the negro can endure to work, climate wrote the argument for slavery, if there is an argument for slavery. The institution rested on the lower South; it was not profitable as labor in the upper South.

The slave was given enough to eat, corn-meal, bacon, molasses, coarse and cheap, and clothing of the cheapest and coarsest sort, the entire cost for food and clothing, on the great sugar plantations, not exceeding an average of thirty dollars a year for each slave. But the number of slaves whose food and clothing cost their masters not over eight dollars a year greatly exceeded that of those upon whom thirty dollars was expended. The test of an overseer's ability was to bring down the cost of food and clothing to the lowest point; the legislation in the lower South on this subject hints at the necessity of correcting, or of attempting to correct, common abuses: for sumptuary legislation, or indeed, legislation of any kind is never enacted until public opinion compels it. The negro quarters, however protective, were hovels, occasionally clean and comfortable, but the testimony of Frances Kemble, who visited several Georgia plantations, is that "the negro huts were the most miserable human habitations I ever beheld" and "not fit to shelter cattle." But the huts were even less filthy than the slaves.