rect the labor of thousands
of people. Few books ever influenced Southern life so much as did this
little word of clear reasoning and convincing statistics.

A year later Calhoun was offering the same arguments in the United
States Senate; South Carolina had already come in a practical way to the
same conclusion. North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana accepted the teaching that slavery was a beneficent social
arrangement. In Kentucky and Tennessee, where James G. Birney and John
Rankin had long worked for gradual emancipation, sentiment rapidly
crystallized about the same dogma. Southern anti-slavery leaders
emigrated to Ohio during the next few years, "leaving Ephraim joined to
his idols"; and Southern men in Congress now replied with increasing
earnestness to the petitions which came from Northern abolitionists. In
1837 it was decided not to receive such petitions, and John Quincy Adams
was given his great theme for agitation; the United States mails were
also closed to abolitionist literature intended for Southern
distribution. The representatives of the great region which stretched
from Baltimore to New Orleans and extended from the coast to the
mountains, united almost to a man in defense of "the institutions of the
South," and he who offered argument or example to the contrary was then
unwelcome and later compelled to hold his tongue or emigrate.

Calhoun now became the undisputed leader of the plantation interests of
the South, and few men were better fitted for the great commission. A
keen and able debater and an enthusiastic Southerner, a combination in
himself of the up-country ideals and the low-country purposes, he had
become the idol of South Carolina. Conciliatory in manner and pure in
all his public and private life, he won the respect and friendship of
the best men in the North, like the Lowells and Winthrops of
Massachusetts, and of Senators Allen, Hannegan, Breese, and the Dodges
of the Northwest. Devoted to the ideal of a great American Union which
he had made strong at the close of the second war with England, he was
willing always to yield something to the West if only his "one
institution" be left alone. Badly treated by Jackson and Van Buren, he
had yet forgiven and joined hands with them both in 1840, in the hope
that the power of Clay and his Eastern allies might be broken. In
Congress and out he was the leader of the South as that section began to
gird her loins for the f