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They declared Slavery illegal within their own borders, but they generally gave the slave-holder time to dispose of his human property by selling it in the States where Slavery still existed. This fact is worth noting, because it became a prime cause of resentment and bitterness when, at a later date, the North began to reproach the South with the guilt of slave-owning.
They could not be enlisted for service in the legions; their disaffection to their masters was notorious; their danger was being proved even now by the horrible condition of Sicily, the fate of its slave-owning landlords, the long, difficult and eventful war which had not even yet been brought to a close.
For the most part they lived in the mountains and the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive to be thought worth cultivating by their rich slave-owning neighbors of the valleys and plains. Their food was meager and of an enervating sameness and their bodies degenerate. Children grew up long and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished plants.
They had no conspicuous respect for women of the sort which should produce the chivalric ideal. They were not free societies, but slave-owning societies. They did not desire, attempt, or even dream, the destruction of the Imperial power: that misfortune which was gradual and never complete in so far as it came about at all, came about in spite of the barbarians and not by their conscious effort.
Fifteen months at fifty pounds let them as can reckon tot it up for theirselves. That's his first swindle and there's others, sir! Oh, there's more behind. That man's just a stinkin' hotbed o' crime. But this 'ere slave-owning is enough to settle his hash, I take it." "Let us have these men here we will hear what they have to say," said Oscard in the same dull tone that frightened Victor Durnovo.
Accordingly in 1836 only three years after the failure of Nullification in South Carolina, the Territory, of Arkansas was forced in as a Slave State, and simultaneously the Slave-owning henchmen of the Conspirators, previously settled there for the purpose, proclaimed the secession from Mexico, and independence, of Texas.
But it must be said in a word that its main trait is the substitution, for a territorial and slave-owning aristocracy, of an industrial democracy. It is the coming of the new man, laborious, enterprising, pushing his way. His development began when the whole community was set to work its way up from the impoverishment left by the war.
It was a noble deed, but it was perhaps carried out a little too suddenly, and it led to grave difficulties, especially in the West Indies, whose prosperity was seriously impaired, and in South Africa, where it brought about acute friction with the slave-owning Boer farmers.
It was popular in the manufacturing towns and in portions of the agricultural communities, but was bitterly opposed by the slave-owning States. A third issue dealt with internal improvements. All parts of the country were feeling the need of better means of communication, especially between the West and the East. Canals and turnpikes were projected in every direction.
In slave-owning communities, barbarity has always been, to some extent, restrained by the actual value of the humanity in question, and slaves were not as cheap in Rome as might be supposed.
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