ravages
of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil
society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of
self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling.
It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon,
an annual address, a few scattered societies to keep a human glow in the
bosom of the infant Confederacy.

The Confederation failed. The formation of a more perfect union was
demanded and undertaken. This transcendent task straightway thrust into
the background every other enterprise and interest. The feeble activity
of the freedom-making principle was checked, for the time being, by the
energy of the nation-making power. They were not antagonistic
forces--only in the natural order of things, the earliest stages in the
evolution of the former had to come after the first steps were taken in
the development of the latter. Before there could start a general
movement against American slavery there must needs be an American
nation. An American nation was, in the year 1787, in process of
successful development. With the adoption of the Constitution, the
national principle entered on a period of marvelous expansion and
activity.

Let it not, however, be hastily concluded that freedom meanwhile was in
total eclipse, that the anti-slavery sentiment was absolutely without
influence. For it unquestionably inspired the Ordinance of 1787. The
Northwest Territory, out of which were subsequently organized the States
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was thereby,
forever secured to the Northern idea, and free labor. Supplementary to
this grand act was the Constitutional prohibition of the African
slave-trade after the year 1808. Together they were intended to
discourage the growth of slavery--the first by restricting its
territorial extension, the second, by arresting its numerical increase.
And without doubt they would have placed the evil in the way of ultimate
extinction had other and far reaching causes not intervened to produce
adverse social and political conditions.

The first of these causes, in point of time, were certain labor-saving
inventions in England, which vastly enhanced the demand for raw cotton.
Arkwright's invention of the spinning machine about twenty years prior
to the adoption of the Constitution, perfected by the spinning-jenny of
Hargreaves, and the mule of Crompton, "turned Lancashire," the historian
Green s