[Illustration:  THE UNITED STATES IN 1859.]

XI

SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES,
1844-1859

Books for Study and Reading

References.—­Scribner’s Popular History, IV; McMaster’s With the Fathers, Coffin’s Building the Nation, 314-324.

Home Readings.—­Wright’s Stories of American Progress; Bolton’s Famous Americans; Brooks’s Boy Settlers; Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Lodge’s Webster.

CHAPTER 31

BEGINNING OF THE ANTISLAVERY AGITATION

[Sidenote:  Antislavery sentiments of the Virginians.]

[Sidenote:  Slavery in the far South.]

[Sidenote:  Source-book, 244-248, 251-260.]

323.  Growth of Slavery in the South.—­South of Pennsylvania and of the Ohio River slavery had increased greatly since 1787 (p. 136).  Washington, Jefferson, Henry, and other great Virginians were opposed to the slave system.  But they could find no way to end it, even in Virginia.  The South Carolinians and Georgians fought every proposition to limit slavery.  They even refused to come into the Union unless they were given representation in Congress for a portion at least of their slaves.  And in the first Congress under the Constitution they opposed bitterly every proposal to limit slavery.  Then came Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin.  That at once made slave labor vastly more profitable in the cotton states and put an end to all hopes of peaceful emancipation in the South.

[Sidenote:  Proposal to end slavery with compensation.]

[Sidenote:  The Liberator.]

324.  Rise of the Abolitionists.—­About 1830 a new movement in favor of the negroes began.  Some persons in the North, as, for example, William Ellery Channing, proposed that slaves should be set free, and their owners paid for their loss.  They suggested that the money received from the sale of the public lands might be used in this way.  But nothing came of these suggestions.  Soon, however, William Lloyd Garrison began at Boston the publication of a paper called the Liberator.  He wished for complete abolition without payment.  For a time he labored almost alone.  Then slowly others came to his aid, and the Antislavery Society was founded.

[Sidenote:  Anti-abolitionist sentiment in the North. Higginson, 268.]

[Sidenote:  Disunion sentiment of abolitionists.]

[Sidenote:  The Garrison riot, 1835. Source-Book, 248-251.]