Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/547

Rh broadening of the suffrage in the different states, in the abolishment of religious and property qualifications for office, in the election of Jackson and the spoils system, and in the war on the United States Bank.

The economic situation rendered the craving for property in the main at one with the ideal of equality. The one noteworthy exception was property in human chattels against which the forces of equality protested until the close of the Civil War. In colonial days African slavery was an American institution. But gradually slavery died out in the north, as the fact that it did not pay became more generally recognized, and even in the south, except in South Carolina and Georgia, the feeling against the institution as late as 1790 was strong. Two events, just at this juncture, the invention of the cotton gin and the introduction of short staple cotton adapted to the uplands of the south, made slave ownership much more profitable and changed the whole situation. The simultaneous introduction of spinning and weaving by steam-driven machinery greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing cotton goods and, aided by improved transportation, brought them into general use, enlarged the market for the product of the cotton fields, hastened the spread of slavery and helped to fasten it more firmly upon the south. Improved transportation also contributed to this result by rendering the interior of the south accessible to the cotton manufacturing centers. Likewise, the growing of slaves in the border states for the southern market became more profitable, and public opinion in these states which had been half way friendly to emancipation suddenly recoiled. As a consequence, slavery ceased to be a national and became a sectional institution. The explanation is at bottom economic, for while slavery as a method of applying labor disappeared in the north, the slave trade continued for some years, even after it had been made unlawful, and was the foundation of not a few fortunes in Newport and other northern cities. Slavery died out in the north because it did not pay, while northerners continued to traffic in slaves because it was profitable. Under the same economic conditions, the southerner is ethically the peer of the northerner.

Property in human beings conflicted with the ideal of equality. So long as one individual owns the body of another, the conception of fair play is set at naught. Not only is the slave denied the freedom necessary to the expression of his personality, but the effect upon the owner is apt to be degrading. The aspirations for better things of both master and slave are either restrained or suppressed. Clearly, slavery was inconsistent with the professions of democracy and was out of accord with the spirit of nineteenth-century civilization. The inconsistency was so glaring that the authors of the constitution scrupulously avoided the use of the words "slave" and "slavery" in framing that document. It would have been strange, therefore, if the restraint and abolition of