least two of the three great compromises that entered into the Constitution were a concession to the slave-holding South. Then across the page of history flashed the brilliant figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the Negro race to obtain its first independent colony outside of the continent of Africa. In America the influence of the chieftain became one of the reasons for the cheap selling of Louisiana, and rendered more certain the prohibition of the slave-trade at the end of 1807. A wave of fear swept over the South, and Georgia and the Carolinas at once passed repressive measures designed especially to restrict the importation of Negroes from the West Indies.

[15]

All-potent, however, proved the cotton-gin. Almost suddenly Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana appeared on the map. By 1830 the exports of what then comprised the Southern states amounted to $32,000,000, and this section had not less than $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves. As a system of labor, however, in spite of seeming advantages, slavery was not slow in revealing its shortcomings. Its ultimate effects on the South were disastrous. As Rhodes says, "It needed no extensive marshaling of statistics to prove that the welfare of the North was greater than that [16]of the South. Two simple facts, everywhere admitted, were of so far-reaching moment that they amounted to irrefragable demonstration. The emigration from the slave states was much larger than the movement in the other direction; and the South repelled the industrious emigrants who came from Europe, while the North attracted them." It was the rich planter rather than the white man of slender means who profited by slavery, wealth being more and more concentrated in the hands of a few; and in 1860, 41 per cent. of the white men who had been born in South Carolina were living in other states. More and more the South realized that she was not keeping pace with the country's development; and one of her own sons, speaking "simply as the voice of the non-slaveholding whites of the South," set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than that of the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and in short that the system was harmful in every way. Helper's book was [17]proscribed in some quarters; nevertheless it succeeded because, in spite of the fact that it did not rest on the broadest principles of humanity, it did attempt to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.

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