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It is not forty years ago, I believe about the year 1829, when the guest whom we honour this morning was spending his solitary days in a prison in the slave-owning city of Baltimore.
It was in this frontier community above the Fall Line that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were born; here they grew to manhood; here they were inspired with those ideals of society so inimical alike to the imperial designs of the British Government and to the complacent pretensions of the slave-owning aristocracies of the tide-water.
In 1856, during one of the many debates that arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to madness. Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked every minor quality of greatness.
In some the authorities have not dared to publish the numbers; in some it is asserted that no vote has ever been taken. This mountain zone is peopled by ardent friends of the Union. Could the Union abandon them, without even an effort, to be dealt with at the pleasure of an exasperated slave-owning oligarchy?
Few Manufactures in the Slave States%. From much of the benefit produced by this splendid series of inventions and discoveries, the people of the slave-owning states were shut out. They raised corn, tobacco, and cotton, and made some sugar; but in them there were very few mills or manufacturing establishments of any sort.
But even after the Revolution something like an aristocracy was to be noted in the older States, North and South, consisting in the North of the old New England families with their mercantile wealth and their Puritan traditions, in the South of the great slave-owning squires.
Substantially all the current abolition arguments appeared in the speeches of the slave-owning members of the Virginia Legislature. And what was done about it? Nothing at all. The petition was not granted; no action looking towards emancipation was taken. This was indeed a turning-point.
The actual garrison including officers, band, and the Castle Pinckney sergeant was less than a hundred. It was, however, loyal to the Union; and its commandant, Major Robert Anderson, though born in the slave-owning State of Kentucky, was determined to fight.
The old sentiment of slave-owning has disappeared before natural common-sense and selfishness.
But originality in war does, and slave-owning nations, having time to think, are likely to be more shrewd in policy, and more crafty in strategy. No doubt this momentary gain is bought at a ruinous after-cost. When other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is past. But all its evils remain, and even grow worse.
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