o its own. And when Eli
Whitney's gin was perfected, cotton was crowned king. Statistics tell
the story: the South produced about 8000 bales of cotton in 1790;
650,000 bales in 1820; 2,469,093 bales in 1850; 5,387,052 bales in
1860.[10] This vast increase in production called for human muscle
which apparently only the negro could supply.

Once it was shown that slavery paid, its status became fixed as
adamant. The South forthwith ceased weakly to apologize for it, as it
had formerly done, and began to defend it, at first with some
hesitation, then with boldness, and finally with vehement
aggressiveness. It was economically necessary; it was morally right;
it was the peculiar Southern domestic institution; and, above all, it
paid. On every basis of its defense, the cotton kingdom would brook no
interference from any other section of the country. So there was
formed a race feudality in the Republic, rooted in profits, protected
by the political power of the slave lords, and enveloped in a spirit
of defiance and bitterness which reacted without mercy upon its
victims. Tighter and tighter were drawn the coils of restrictions
around the enslaved race. The mind and the soul as well as the body
were placed under domination. They might marry to breed but not to
make homes. Such charity and kindness as they experienced, they
received entirely from individual humane masters; society treated them
merely as chattels.

Attempted insurrections, such as that in South Carolina in 1822 and
that in Virginia in 1831 in which many whites and blacks were killed,
only produced harsher laws and more cruel punishments, until finally
the slave became convinced that his only salvation lay in running
away. The North Star was his beacon light of freedom. A few thousand
made their way southward through the chain of swamps that skirt the
Atlantic coast and mingled with the Indians in Florida. Tens of
thousands made their way northward along well recognized routes to the
free States and to Canada: the Appalachian ranges with their
far-spreading spurs furnished the friendliest of these highways; the
Mississippi Valley with its marshlands, forests, and swamps provided
less secure hiding places; and the Cumberland Mountains, well supplied
with limestone caves, offered a third pathway. At the northern end of
these routes the "Underground Railway"[11] received the fugitives.
From the Cumberlands, leading through the heart of Tennessee and
Kentucky, thi