Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/294

256 was the commercial and social disadvantages of slavery. As the South is said to have been awakened to the immorality and the blighting hindrances of slavery to its prosperity, after emancipation was enforced by armies, so the North saw the same immorality and general hurt to the Union only after proofs of the unprofitableness of the institution to that section. Both sections abolished slavery under duress one under duress—of unprofitableness, the other vi et armis.

The law of profit and loss controlled the origin and extension of slavery; sectional rivalries seized upon it as an incident in the strife for supremacy ; political party purpose at length found it to be an available means to partisan successes, and the moral side of it shone forth upon the whole nation only after a bloody war between the old sections. Eyes were opened by the shock of battle. The moral sense stood godfather to &quot;military necessity.&quot;

At the organization of the United States, slave-holding was legal everywhere in the Union except in Massachusetts, because at that time it bore some profit every where. It is a suggestion of Mr. Greeley in his American Conflict &quot;that the importation of Africans in slave ships profited New England;&quot; the labor of the slaves thus imported at a profit was valuable to their owners who bought them from the slave traders, and also to the manufacturers and sellers of the products of their toil. Trading in human flesh was, therefore, insisted on as a proper business demanding constitutional enforcement for twenty years. The following States voted for the continuance of the slave trade for twenty years until 1808: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The following voted nay: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia.

Slave labor, therefore, must be treated historically as