Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, and Hamilton—­were unanimous in execrating the practice of slavery, and looked forward to the time when it would cease to contaminate the soil of free America.  The abolition of the slave trade, which subsequently followed, was regarded by its warmest advocates as not only beneficial in itself, but as a long step towards the extinction of slavery altogether, it was not foreseen that certain free and democratic communities would arise which would apply themselves to the honourable office of breeding slaves, to be consumed on the free and democratic plantations of the South, and of thus replacing the African slave trade by an internal traffic in human flesh, carried on under circumstances of almost equal atrocity through the heart of a free and democratic nation.  Democracy has verily a strong digestion, and one not to be interfered with by trifles.

“But the most melancholy part of the matter is, that during the seventy years for which the American confederacy has existed, the whole tone of sentiment with regard to slavery has, in the Southern States at least, undergone a remarkable change.  Slavery used to be treated as a thoroughly exceptional institution—­as an evil legacy of evil times—­as a disgrace to a constitution founded on the natural freedom and independence of mankind.  There was hardly a political leader of any note who had not some plan for its abolition.  Jefferson himself, the greatest chief of the democracy, had in the early part of this century speculated deeply on the subject; but the United States became possessed of Louisiana and Florida, they have conquered Texas, they have made Arkansas and Missouri into States; and these successive acquisitions have altered entirely the view with which slavery is regarded.  Perhaps as much as anything, from the long license enjoyed by the editors of the South of writing what they pleased in favour of slavery, with the absolute certainty that no one would be found bold enough to write anything on the other side, and thus make himself a mark for popular vengeance, the subject has come to be written on in a tone of ferocious and cynical extravagance, which is to an European eye absolutely appalling.  The South has become enamoured of her shame.  Free labour is denounced as degrading and disgraceful; the honest triumphs of the poor man who works his way to independence are treated with scorn and contempt.  It is asserted that what we are in the habit of regarding as the honorable pursuits of industry incapacitate a nation for civilisation and refinement, and that no institutions can be really free and democratic which do not rest, like those of Athens and of Rome, on a broad substratum of slavery.  So far from treating slavery as an exceptional institution, it is regarded by these Democratic philosophers as the natural state of a great portion of the human race; and, so far from admitting that America ought to look forward to its extinction, it is contended that the property in human creatures ought to be as universal as the property in land or in tame animals.