sion in relation to
its abstract merits was allowed, with the tacit condition imposed,
however, just as really though not as consciously as now, that slavery
itself must not be disturbed. Talk which had in it any touch of genuine
feeling in favor of active exertion to rid the country of the
institution as an evil, was then as effectually tabooed as it is to-day,
with some minor exceptions on the borders of the slaveholding region, in
Baltimore, North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, etc., and with the further
exception when Virginia was terrified for a few weeks or months by the
results of a desperate insurrection. On the strength of these few
exceptions, it has been claimed at the South, and still more
persistently by Southern sympathizers at the North, that the whole drift
and tendency of things at the South prior to the commencement of the
abolition agitation at the North were toward gradual emancipation, and
that they would have ultimated at an early day in that result. This,
too, is a pleasant fiction with the least possible percentage of truth
at the bottom of it.

The institution of slavery, under the stimulus given to it by the
invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, and the consequent
development of the cotton-growing industry--aided, curiously enough, in
a certain sense, by the prohibition of the African slave trade, giving
rise to the slave-rearing business in Virginia and Maryland--has all
along been exhibiting a steady, sturdy, and rapid growth. By the
alliance, accidentally as it were, resulting from the prohibition of the
slave trade, between the Southern and the Northern slaveholding States,
a robustness and consistency were given to the whole slaveholding
interest which possibly it might never have had under a different
policy. If the foreign importation of slaves had continued, that species
of population would gradually have overrun the cotton-raising border of
States--would have overrun them to an extent threatening the safety of
the institution there by its own plethora--while from the southern line
of North Carolina and Tennessee northward, where this extra-profitable
industry could not readily be extended, the temptation to the
importation of slaves would have been slight, no market existing for the
home increase. The hold of the institution would have been constantly
weakened there in the affections of the white population; and, in those
States, there is a seeming probability that white labor and