The Brothers' War - The Original Classic Edition. John Calvin
be got by every farmer ad libitum, slaves must lose their value as property and be driven to the wall? Free labor was kept out of the south by
the repugnance of the white laborer to the negro. Note also that when the number of slaves had become considerable their owners would naturally combine to protect the market value of their property by preventing the coming in of cheaper labor. This was the real reason why Virginia and Delaware opposed the[Pg 46] extension of the African slave-trade from 1800 to 1808, and the Confederate States' constitution refused to reopen it. Slavery made some headway in the north. But not finding there the stimulus of such products as tobacco and cotton, it could not become so widespread and deep-seated as to sweep out free labor. The latter under favorable conditions commenced the competition in which it could not fail to win; and in due time slavery died out in the north. We especially desire to emphasize the attitude towards extension of slavery that free labor was bound to take. That it had already ejected slavery from every other enlightened community will occur to the reader at once as weighty proof that the two cannot live together. [23] Think of the free worker's suffrage, and you cannot believe that he could long be induced to vote for the protection and further spread of a system taking the bread out of his own mouth, and degrading him by engendering profound disrespect for his class; and then think of the vast and rapidly growing numbers of the free laborers of the north, receiving every day great accessions of foreign immigrants avoiding the south as they would the plague; think of all these, and you begin to discern what a mighty power was rising against slavery.
This has brought us to the place where we can properly treat the contention for the Territories. Consider their vast area. Remember that our people have settled thereon in such numbers that thirty-two new States have been added to the old thirteen, and others
still are to be added. Here for some generations was land for the landless; the full meaning of which Henry George has made us plainly see. The adventurous and [Pg 47]enterprising of the old States of each section set their faces thitherward in a constantly swelling stream. Attend to the only material difference for us between the northerner and the southerner going west. Each settler wanted a community like his native one. The northerner had not been trained to manage slave labor and property; he did not like it; he thought it out of date and vastly inferior to free labor; and he could not endure to have himself and family live among negroes, repulsive to him because of unfamiliarity. He had learned from its history in the south that wherever slavery established itself it superseded all other labor. Therefore he would none of it in his new home; and he settled in a non-slave community. Of course the southerner, knowing nothing of free labor and bred into a love of the slave system, settled among slaveholders. And so for a generation or two free and slave States were steadily added to the union in pairs.
But the unsettled lands were diminishing in area. Its population multiplying so marvellously, the north felt urgent need for the whole of these lands. The great majority of settlers going thence into the Territories were farmers. Note some of the more influential classes left behind them. The parents, relatives, and friends who wanted them suited in the west--this was the largest class of all,
and it was of prodigious intellectual, political, and moral potency. Then the manufacturers of agricultural implements, and of many articles, all of which the southerners either had their mechanic slaves to make by hand, and of oldtime fashion, or did without; the millers, and many sorts of wholesale merchants who had found slave owners poor and the employers of free labor good customers; and these manufacturers and merchants were greedy for the new markets which they could get only in free States.
[Pg 48]These are but the merest hints, but they serve somewhat to suggest the all-powerful motives which at last united the great majority of northern people, east and west, in intelligent and inveterate opposition to the further spread of slavery.
Now look at the southern situation. At the outset, note that his slaves were the southerner's only laborers, and practically his only property. And note especially that this property was not only self-supporting, but it was also the most rapidly self-reproducing that Tom, Dick, and Harry ever had in all history. A reliable witness tells this: "On my father's plantation an aged negro woman could call together more than one hundred of her lineal descendants. I saw this old negro dance at the wedding of her great-granddaugh- ter."[24]
Let me repeat that slaves were not only money-making laborers, but also things of valuable property, which of themselves multiplied as dollars do at compound interest. Let the northern man unfamiliar with slavery try to understand this one of its phases by suppos-ing that he has orchards abundantly yielding a fruit which is in good demand, and that the trees plant and tend themselves, gather
and store the fruit, set out other orchards, and do all things else necessary to care for the property and keep it steadily growing. Such trees with their yearly produce and prodigious increase--each by an easy organic or natural, and not by a difficult artificial, process, relieving the owner from all but the slightest attention and labor of superintendence--would soon be the only ones in their entire zone of production; bringing it about that all other occupations and property therein would be dependent upon this main and really only industry. Such orchards would be somewhat like the slaves in their automatic production[Pg 49] and accumulation, but they would be much inferior as marketable property in many particulars.
Although the profits of slave-planting were considerable, the greatest profit of all was what the master thought of and talked of all the day long,--the natural increase of his slaves, as he called it. His negroes were far more to him than his land. His planting was the
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furthest removed of all from a proper restorative agriculture. Quickly exhausting his new cleared fields, he looked elsewhere for oth-er virgin soil to wear out. The number of the slaves in the south was growing fast, and the new lands in the older slave States were nearly gone. To keep the hens laying the golden eggs of natural increase, nests must be found for them on the cotton, sugar, and rice lands of the Territories. In other words, the area of slave culture must be extended; for whenever there is no land for a considerable number of our workers, it is evident that we have a surplus of slaves; and the effect of that will be at the first to lower the market value of our only property, and then gradually to destroy it. So the instincts of the southerners whispered in their ears.
We hope that we now have helped you to an understanding of the active principles each of free labor and of slave labor; how by reason of them the interests of north and south in dividing the public domain were in irreconcilable conflict; and how it was natural that the free States should band together against, and the slave States band together for, slavery. Thus the country split into two geographical though not political sections, the political division which ripened later being as yet only imminent and inchoate. That these sections had been made by deadly war between free labor and slave labor is all that we have to say here. The development went further, as we shall explain in the next[Pg 50] chapter--all of it under the propulsion of the two active principles. They were always the ultimate and supreme motors. Often they are not to be seen at all. Still more often what they did was disguised. To read the facts of that time aright you must always and everywhere look for their work. Do that patiently, and you will detect every one of the many controversies over matters affecting an interest of either section as such--whether questions apparently of national politics, of mor-als, or religion, in newspapers, pamphlets, reviews, books, and all the vast contemporary literature, in the pulpit, on the platform, and in every place and corner of the entire land where policy and impolicy or right and wrong were mooted--to be but a part of one or the other of two great complexes of machinery, each geared to its particular motor and kept going by its mighty push.
[Pg 51] CHAPTER IV
GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION
NATIONALIZATION is the process by which a nation makes itself. The process may be active for a long while without completion, as we see in the case of Ireland; it may form a nation, but to be overturned and wiped out, as the southern confederacy was; or it may find its consummation in such a powerful one as the United States. The most conspicuous effect of the process we now have in hand is to make one of many communities. But sometimes a part breaks off from a nation and sets up and maintains its independence as a country. Thus a portion of the territory of Mexico was settled over from our States, and after a while these settlers