Baptist, of South Carolina, in the twenties, and Palmer, the Presbyterian of New Orleans, in the fifties, are all now remembered mainly because they defended their section in keeping the Negro in bonds.  William and Mary College, and even the University of Virginia, as compared with Harvard and Yale, became provincial institutions; and instead of the Washington or Jefferson of an earlier day now began to be nourished such a leader as “Bob” Toombs, who for all of his fire and eloquence was a demagogue.  In making its choice the South could not and did not blame the Negro per se, for it was freely recognized that upon slave labor rested such economic stability as the section possessed.  The tragedy was simply that thousands of intelligent Americans deliberately turned their faces to the past, and preferred to read the novels of Walter Scott and live in the Middle Ages rather than study the French Revolution and live in the nineteenth century.  One hundred years after we find that the chains are still forged, that thought is not yet free.  Thus the Negro Problem began to be, and still is, very largely the problem of the white man of the South.  The era of capitalism had not yet dawned, and still far in the future was the day when the poor white man and the Negro were slowly to realize that their interests were largely identical.

The argument with which the South came to support its position and to defend slavery need not here detain us at length.  It was formally stated by Dew and others[1] and it was to be heard on every hand.  One could hardly go to church, to say nothing of going to a public meeting, without hearing echoes of it.  In general it was maintained that slavery had made for the civilization of the world in that it had mitigated the evils of war, had made labor profitable, had changed the nature of savages, and elevated woman.  The slave-trade was of course horrible and unjust, but the great advantages of the system more than outweighed a few attendant evils.  Emancipation and deportation were alike impossible.  Even if practicable, they would not be expedient measures, for they meant the loss to Virginia of one-third of her property.  As for morality, it was not to be expected that the Negro should have the sensibilities of the white man.  Moreover the system had the advantage of cultivating a republican spirit among the white people.  In short, said Dew, the slaves, in both the economic and the moral point of view, were “entirely unfit for a state of freedom among the whites.”  Holland, already cited, in 1822 maintained five points, as follows:  1.  That the United States are one for national purposes, but separate for their internal regulation and government; 2.  That the people of the North and East “always exhibited an unfriendly feeling on subjects affecting the interests of the South and West”; 3.  That the institution of slavery was not an institution of the South’s voluntary choosing; 4.  That the Southern sections of the Union, both before and after the Declaration