The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1a

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PART I.

CHAPTER I.

Inasmuch as questions growing out of the institution of negro servitude,
or connected with it, will occupy a conspicuous place in what is to
follow, it is important that the reader should have, in the very outset,
a right understanding of the true nature and character of those
questions. No subject has been more generally misunderstood or more
persistently misrepresented. The institution itself has ceased to exist
in the United States; the generation, comprising all who took part in
the controversies to which it gave rise, or for which it afforded a
pretext, is passing away; and the misconceptions which have prevailed in
our own country, and still more among foreigners remote from the field
of contention, are likely to be perpetuated in the mind of posterity,
unless corrected before they become crystallized by tacit acquiescence.

It is well known that, at the time of the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, African servitude existed in all the States that were
parties to that compact, unless with the single exception of
Massachusetts, in which it had, perhaps, very recently ceased to exist.
The slaves, however, were numerous in the Southern, and very few in the
Northern, States. This diversity was occasioned by differences of
climate, soil, and industrial interests--not in any degree by moral
considerations, which at that period were not recognized, as an element
in the question. It was simply because negro labor was more profitable
in the South than in the North that the importation of negro slaves had
been, and continued to be, chiefly directed to the Southern ports.[1]
For the same reason slavery was abolished by the States of the Northern
section (though it existed in several of them for