Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/292

254 and South, was, therefore, regarded as the chief distraction to be removed by the settlement effected in 1850.

Briefly stating the case in 1850, let it be considered that the old sectional differences on account of commercial rivalry and political supremacy had at length become hostilities, which for the first time seriously threatened the Union of the States. Let it also be understood that the agitation which immediately preceded the settlement of 1850 was caused directly by differences of views as to the proper disposition of the national institution of slavery.

The statesmen of 1850 knew the following facts: The United States had indorsed the existence of slavery and authorized the importation of enslaved Africans; the colonies, separately acting previous to their Union, had established the institution in their labor systems. The European governments which held paramount authority over the colonies had originated it. The chiefs of African tribes enforced it by their wars, and profited by it in the sale of their captives to foreigners. The world at large practiced it in some form. Thus the African kings, the governments of Europe and America, the ship owners, slave traders, speculators and pioneers of the New World conspired to initiate a wrong, from which a retribution at length followed, in which the innocent slave with his last Southern owner suffered more than all the guilty parties who had profited by his bondage.

The hardy and adventurous settlers in the American colonies permitted themselves after occasional protests, such as occurred in Virginia, and afterward in Georgia, to be seduced into the buying of negroes from the artful and avaricious slave traders of England, Holland and New England. The importations, however, were few, because the European possessions in the semi-tropics were the first takers of this species of property. Tidings of the evils of the system in its barbarous stages, and stories all too true of the horrors of the middle passage aboard