in 1791 to four hundred and fifty
thousand in 1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in 1860.

There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended upon
slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn of history,
he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he wanted was right
and holy. From one end of the South to the other the pulpits rang with
the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to servants shall he be to his
brethren." The learned Bishop Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery",
gave the standard interpretation of this text:

The Almighty, forseeing the total degredation of the Negro
race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under the
descendants of Shem and Japheth, doubtless because he judged
it to be their fittest condition.

I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from defenses
of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus Christ--and not
only from the South, but from the North. For it must be understood
that leading families of Massachusetts and New York owed their power
to Slavery; their fathers had brought molasses from New Orleans and
made it into rum, and taken it to the coast of Africa to be exchanged
for slaves for the Southern planters. And after this trade was
outlawed, the slave-grown cotton had still to be shipped to the North
and spun; so the traders of the North must have divine sanction for
the Fugitive Slave law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The
slavery of the negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in
the Old and New Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of New
York, giving the decision of a clerical man of the world: "There is no
debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise, and it may
continue through the Millenium."

And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in arms against
those who presumed to interfere with this divine institution, the men
of God of the South called down blessings upon their armies in words
which, with the proper change of names, might have been spoken in
Berlin in August, 1914. Thus Dr. Thornwell, one of the leading
Presbyterian divines of the South: "The triumph of Lincoln's
principles is the death-knell of slavery.... Let us crush the serpent
in the egg." And the Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: "The war is a
war against slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against
the Word, Providence and Government of God." I read in the pape