Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/33

Rh and religious—of the people. Religion never held so prominent a place in the consciousness of the mass as in the sterner and more austere colonies of the North. In the Southern States—New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia,—slavery easily found a footing at an early day. It was not at all repulsive to the ideas, the institutions, and habits of Georgia and South Carolina. The other Southern States protested against it;—they never. Consequences follow causes; it is not easy to avoid the results of a first principle. The Northern States, in all their constitutions and social structure, consistently and continually tend to Democracy—the government of all, for all, and by all;—to equality before the State and its laws; to moral and political ideas of universal application. In the mean time the Southern States, in their constitutions and social structure, as consistently tend to Oligarchy the government over all, by a few, and for the sake of that few;—to privilege, favouritism, and class-legislation; to conventional limitations ; to the rule of force, and in equality before the law. In such a state of things when slavery comes, it is welcome. In 1787, South Carolina and Georgia refused to accept the Federal Constitution unless the right of importing slaves was guaranteed to them for twenty years. The new States formed in the Southern parallels—Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi — retaining the ideas and habits of their parents, kept also the institution of slavery.

At the time of forming the Federal Constitution some of the Southern statesmen were hostile to slavery, and would gladly have got rid of it. Economical considerations prevailed in part, but political and moral objections to it extended yet more widely. The Ordinance of 1787, the work mainly of the same man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, passed with little opposition. The proviso for surrendering fugitive slaves came from a Northern hand. Subsequently opposition to slavery, in the North and the South, became less. The culture of cotton, the wars in Europe creating a demand for the productions of American agriculture, had rendered slave labour more valuable. The day of our own oppression was more distant and forgotten. So in 1802, when Congress purchased