Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/300

262 States, that the emancipation sentiment died down under the pressure of commercial considerations not only in the Cotton States, but also in the manufacturing and commercial centers of the world. (Greg s History, 351.) After the year 1808 (cessation of the legalized slave trade) the national increase of the enslaved race exceeded in percentage that of any free people on earth. Freed from care, fed, clothed and sheltered for the sake of their labor, protected from hurtful indulgence and worked with regularity the physical conditions were all favorable to increase in numbers, stature, longevity and strength. It is clearly just to admit that such an improvement in the race imported from the African wilds undoubtedly proves the humanity with which these captured bondsmen were treated by the people of the United States.

It was this commercial value of the slave to the Southern planters of cane, cotton, rice and tobacco, and to the Northern and European shippers, manufacturers, merchants and operatives—a value caused by the crude, elementary materials of wealth which negro labor produced—a value that grew in great proportions for commerce—a value that began to assume political importance because of the power that it gave the slave-holding States—it was this factor which on the one hand blinded many in all sections to those moral and economic fallacies on which African slavery really rested, and on the other hand finally excited political jealousy and sectional fears of the power which the Southern section might acquire in the control of the Union.