The connection between slavery and politics was this; as population slowly grew in the South, and as the land in the older States became to some extent exhausted, the desire for fresh territory in which cultivation by slaves could flourish became stronger and stronger.  This was the reason for which the South became increasingly aware of a sectional interest in politics.  In all other respects the community of public interests, of business dealings, and of general intercourse was as great between North and South as between East and West.  It is certain that throughout the South, with the doubtful exception of South Carolina, political instinct and patriotic pride would have made the idea of separation intolerable upon any ground except that of slavery.  In regard to this matter of dispute a peculiar phenomenon is to be observed.  The quarrel grew not out of any steady opposition between North and South, but out of the habitual domination of the country by the South and the long-continued submission of the North to that domination.

For the North had its full share of blame for the long course of proceedings which prepared the coming tragedy, and the most impassioned writers on the side of the Union during the Civil War have put that blame highest.  The South became arrogant and wrong-headed, and no defence is possible for the chief acts of Southern policy which will be recorded later; but the North was abject.  To its own best sons it seemed to have lost both its conscience and its manhood, and to be stifled in the coils of its own miserable political apparatus.  Certainly the prevailing attitude of the Northern to the Southern politicians was that of truckling.  And Southerners who went to Washington had a further reason for acquiring a fatal sense of superiority to the North.  The tradition of popular government which maintained itself in the South caused men who were respected, in private life, and were up to a point capable leaders, who were, in short, representative, to be sent to Congress and to be kept there.  The childish perversion of popular government which took hold of the newer and more unsettled population in the North led them to send to Congress an ever-changing succession of unmeritable and sometimes shady people.  The eventual stirring of the mind of the North which so closely concerns this biography was a thing hard to bring about, and to the South it brought a great shock of surprise.

7. Intellectual Development.

No survey of the political movements of this period should conclude without directing attention to something more important, which cannot be examined here.  In the years from 1830 till some time after the death of Lincoln, America made those contributions to the literature of our common language which, though neither her first nor her last, seemed likely to be most permanently valued.  The learning and literature of America at that time centred round Boston and Harvard University