Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/185

Rh making it more profitable than it ever had been before. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 had made the culture of cotton a very productive source of wealth. In 1800 the exportation of cotton from the United States was 19,000,000 pounds, valued at $5,700,000. In 1820 the value of the cotton export was nearly $20,000,000, almost all of it the product of slave labor. The value of slaves may be said to have at least trebled in twenty years. The breeding of slaves became a profitable industry. Under such circumstances the slave-holders arrived at the conclusion that slavery was by no means so wicked and hurtful an institution as their revolutionary fathers had thought it to be. The anti-slavery professions of the revolutionary time became to them an awkward reminiscence, which they would have been glad to wipe from their own and other people's memories.

On the other hand, in the Northern States there was no such change of feeling. Slavery was still, in the nature of things, believed to be a wrong and a sore. The change of sentiment in the South had not yet produced its reflex in the North. The slavery question had not become a subject of difference of opinion and of controversy among the Northern people. As they had abolished slavery in their states, so they took it for granted that it ought to disappear, and would disappear in time, everywhere else. Slavery had indeed, now and then, asserted itself in the discussions of Congress