=Slavery Defended as a Positive Good.=—­As the abolition agitation increased and the planting system expanded, apologies for slavery became fainter and fainter in the South.  Then apologies were superseded by claims that slavery was a beneficial scheme of labor control.  Calhoun, in a famous speech in the Senate in 1837, sounded the new note by declaring slavery “instead of an evil, a good—­a positive good.”  His reasoning was as follows:  in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided.  The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded, “will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers.”

=Slave Owners Dominate Politics.=—­The new doctrine of Calhoun was eagerly seized by the planters as they came more and more to overshadow the small farmers of the South and as they beheld the menace of abolition growing upon the horizon.  It formed, as they viewed matters, a moral defense for their labor system—­sound, logical, invincible.  It warranted them in drawing together for the protection of an institution so necessary, so inevitable, so beneficent.

Though in 1850 the slave owners were only about three hundred and fifty thousand in a national population of nearly twenty million whites, they had an influence all out of proportion to their numbers.  They were knit together by the bonds of a common interest.  They had leisure and wealth.  They could travel and attend conferences and conventions.  Throughout the South and largely in the North, they had the press, the schools, and the pulpits on their side.  They formed, as it were, a mighty union for the protection and advancement of their common cause.  Aided by those mechanics and farmers of the North who stuck by Jacksonian Democracy through thick and thin, the planters became a power in the federal government.  “We nominate Presidents,” exultantly boasted a Richmond newspaper; “the North elects them.”

This jubilant Southern claim was conceded by William H. Seward, a Republican Senator from New York, in a speech describing the power of slavery in the national government.  “A party,” he said, “is in one sense a joint stock association, in which those who contribute most direct the action and management of the concern....  The slaveholders, contributing in an overwhelming proportion to the strength of the Democratic party, necessarily dictate and prescribe its policy.”  He went on:  “The slaveholding class has become the governing power in each of the slaveholding states and it practically chooses thirty of the sixty-two members of the Senate, ninety of the two hundred and thirty-three members