in order to preserve and to
perpetuate slavery; or, to put it more forcibly, that the liberty to
enslave others was the right which most they valued. This charge, put
forward by the abolitionists in order to cloak their own revolt
against the Constitution, is true as regards a certain section, but
as regards the South as a nation it is quite untenable, for
three-fourths of the population derived rather injury than benefit
from the presence in their midst of four million serfs.* (* Of 8.3
million whites in the fifteen slave-holding States, only 346,000 were
slave-holders, and of these 69,000 owned only one negro.) "Had
slavery continued, the system of labour," says General Grant, "would
soon have impoverished the soil and left the country poor. The
non-slave-holder must have left the country, and the small
slave-holder have sold out to his more fortunate neighbour."* (*
Battles and Leaders volume 3 page 689.) The slaves neither bought nor
sold. Their wants were supplied almost entirely by their own labour;
and the local markets of the South would have drawn far larger profit
from a few thousand white labourers than they did from the multitude
of negroes. It is true that a party in the South, more numerous
perhaps among the political leaders than among the people at large,
was averse to emancipation under any form or shape. There were men
who looked upon their bondsmen as mere beasts of burden, more
valuable but hardly more human than the cattle in their fields, and
who would not only have perpetuated but have extended slavery. There
were others who conscientiously believed that the negro was unfit for
freedom, that he was incapable of self-improvement, and that he was
far happier and more contented as a slave. Among these were ministers
of the Gospel, in no small number, who, appealing to the Old
Testament, preached boldly that the institution was of divine origin,
that the coloured race had been created for servitude, and that to
advocate emancipation was to impugn the wisdom of the Almighty.

But there were still others, including many of those who were not
slave-owners, who, while they acquiesced in the existence of an
institution for which they were not personally accountable, looked
forward to its ultimate extinction by the voluntary action of the
States concerned. It was impossible as yet to touch the question
openly, for the invectives and injustice of the abolitionists had so
wrought upon the Southern people, t