(February, 1861) the
eventual loss of his slaves, and the military head of the Confederacy
actually set his slaves free before the war was half over."--The Motives
and Aims of the Soldiers of the South in the Civil War, p. 28. The whole
oration confirms the positions taken in this article.]

There were theorists who maintained that a society based on the rock of
slavery was the best possible in a world where there must be a lowest
order; and the doctrine of the "mud-sill" as propounded by a leading
thinker of this school evoked mud volcanoes all over the North.
Scriptural arguments in defence of slavery formed a large part of the
literature of the subject, and the hands of Southern clergymen were
upheld by their conservative brothers beyond the border.

Some who had read the signs of the times otherwise knew that slavery was
doomed by the voice of the world, and that no theory of society could
withstand the advance of the new spirit; and if the secrets of all
hearts could have been revealed, our enemies would have been astounded
to see how many thousands and tens of thousands in the Southern States
felt the crushing burden and the awful responsibility of the institution
which we were supposed to be defending with the melodramatic fury of
pirate kings. We were born to this social order, we had to do our duty
in it according to our lights, and this duty was made indefinitely more
difficult by the interference of those who, as we thought, could not
understand the conditions of the problem, and who did not have to bear
the expense of the experiments they proposed.

There were the practical men who saw in the negro slave an efficient
laborer in a certain line of work, and there were the practical men who
doubted the economic value of our system as compared with that of the
free States, and whom the other practical men laughed to scorn.

There was the small and eminently respectable body of benevolent men who
promoted the scheme of African colonization, of which great things were
expected in my boyhood. The manifest destiny of slavery in America was
the regeneration of Africa.

The people at large had no theory, and the practice varied as much in
the relation of master and servant as it varied in other family
relations. Too much tragedy and too much idyl have been imported into
the home life of the Southern people; but this is not the place to
reduce poetry to prose.

On one point, however, all parties in the South were