United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slave-holding or the non-slave-holding states.
There remained indeed but a single bond of connection between the slave-holding and the non-slave-holding States, viz., fealty to party. But in 1848 not even this slender link was intact. The anti-slavery uprising was a fast growing factor in the politics of the free States.
Its social system was aristocratic; above the slaves came the non-slave-holding whites, including a great mass of the ignorant and degraded; but at the summit the slave-holding class had a social life in many ways attractive and delightful. The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000.
That, while we mutually refuse to concede anything now for the sake of national unity, we will be mutually ready to concede everything by and by for the sake of national duality? Who believes this? What, too, would be the fate of the youthful but giant Northwest in the event of a separation of the slave-holding from the non-slave-holding States?
According to the tendency of things, the sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will hardly light the hovel of a single slave! The opening of the modern era found slavery universally distributed. There was perhaps at the middle of the eighteenth century not a single non-slave-holding race or nation on the globe!
The book teemed with such sentences as this, addressing slaveholders: "Do you aspire to become victims of white non-slave-holding vengeance by day and of barbarous massacres by the negroes at night?" It is scarcely strange, therefore, that in 1859 no Southerner would hear a good word of anyone caught distributing the book.
Word Of The Day