of kindlier times.  With the close of the long struggle other questions arose; got the people’s ears; fixed the attention of the leaders.  Scant notice could emancipation extort from men who had to repair the ravages of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder.  The instinct of self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling.  It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon, an annual address, a few scattered societies to keep a human glow in the bosom of the infant Confederacy.

The Confederation failed.  The formation of a more perfect union was demanded and undertaken.  This transcendent task straightway thrust into the background every other enterprise and interest.  The feeble activity of the freedom-making principle was checked, for the time being, by the energy of the nation-making power.  They were not antagonistic forces—­only in the natural order of things, the earliest stages in the evolution of the former had to come after the first steps were taken in the development of the latter.  Before there could start a general movement against American slavery there must needs be an American nation.  An American nation was, in the year 1787, in process of successful development.  With the adoption of the Constitution, the national principle entered on a period of marvelous expansion and activity.

Let it not, however, be hastily concluded that freedom meanwhile was in total eclipse, that the anti-slavery sentiment was absolutely without influence.  For it unquestionably inspired the Ordinance of 1787.  The Northwest Territory, out of which were subsequently organized the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was thereby, forever secured to the Northern idea, and free labor.  Supplementary to this grand act was the Constitutional prohibition of the African slave-trade after the year 1808.  Together they were intended to discourage the growth of slavery—­the first by restricting its territorial extension, the second, by arresting its numerical increase.  And without doubt they would have placed the evil in the way of ultimate extinction had other and far reaching causes not intervened to produce adverse social and political conditions.

The first of these causes, in point of time, were certain labor-saving inventions in England, which vastly enhanced the demand for raw cotton.  Arkwright’s invention of the spinning machine about twenty years prior to the adoption of the Constitution, perfected by the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, and the mule of Crompton, “turned Lancashire,” the historian Green says, “into a hive of industry.”  The then rapid demand for cotton operated in time as a stimulus to its production in America.  Increased productivity raised the value of slave property and slave soil.  But the slow and tedious hand method of separating the fiber of the cotton bulb from the seed greatly limited the ability of the Cotton States to meet and satisfy the fast growing demand of the English manufacturers, until Eli Whitney, in 1793, by an ingenious invention solved the problem of supply for these States.  The cotton gin was not long in proving itself the other half—­the other hand of the spinning machine.