ersies which
arose between the States, and the war in which they culminated, were
caused by efforts on the one side to extend and perpetuate human
slavery, and on the other to resist it and establish human liberty. The
Southern States and Southern people have been sedulously represented as
"propagandists" of slavery, and the Northern as the defenders and
champions of universal freedom, and this view has been so arrogantly
assumed, so dogmatically asserted, and so persistently reiterated, that
its authors have, in many cases, perhaps, succeeded in bringing
themselves to believe it, as well as in impressing it widely upon the
world.

The attentive reader of the preceding chapters--especially if he has
compared their statements with contemporaneous records and other
original sources of information--will already have found evidence enough
to enable him to discern the falsehood of these representations, and to
perceive that, to whatever extent the question of slavery may have
served as an _occasion_, it was far from being the _cause_ of the
conflict.

I have not attempted, and shall not permit myself to be drawn into any
discussion of the merits or demerits of slavery as an ethical or even as
a political question. It would be foreign to my purpose, irrelevant to
my subject, and would only serve--as it has invariably served, in the
hands of its agitators--to "darken counsel" and divert attention from
the genuine issues involved.

As a mere historical fact, we have seen that African servitude among
us--confessedly the mildest and most humane of all institutions to which
the name "slavery" has ever been applied--existed in all the original
States, and that it was recognized and protected in the fourth article
of the Constitution. Subsequently, for climatic, industrial, and
economical--not moral or sentimental--reasons, it was abolished in the
Northern, while it continued to exist in the Southern States. Men
differed in their views as to the abstract question of its right or
wrong, but for two generations after the Revolution there was no
geographical line of demarkation for such differences. The African
slave-trade was carried on almost exclusively by New England merchants
and Northern ships. Mr. Jefferson--a Southern man, the founder of the
Democratic party, and the vindicator of State rights--was in theory a
consistent enemy to every form of slavery. The Southern States took the
lead in prohibiting the slave-trade, and, a