True Civil War." pp. 28, 29, 30.) And history further attests that Virginia was the first State, North or South, to prohibit the slave traffic from Africa, and that Georgia was the first to incorporate that prohibition in her Constitution.
We have no desire to say unkind things about the North. But it is easy to show, that as long as slavery existed there, as it did in all the Colonies when independence was declared, the treatment of slaves by the people of that section was as harsh as, if not more so, than was ever known in any part of the South. Not only is this true, but it is also easy to show that as long as the people of the North were the owners of slaves they regarded and treated and disposed of them as "property," just as the people of England had done since 1713, when slaves were held to be "merchandise" by the twelve judges of that country, with the venerable Holt at their head. We could further show that slavery existed at the North just as long as it was profitable to have it there; that the moral and religious sense of that section was only heard to complain of that institution after it was found to be unprofitable, and after the people of that section had, for the most part, sold their slaves to the people of the South; and that, after Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, which wrought such a revolution in the production of cotton at the South as to cause slave labor greatly to increase in value, and which induced many Northern men to engage in that production, these men almost invariably purchased their slaves for that purpose, and many of these owned them when the war broke out.
The South was then in no sense responsible for the existence of slavery within its borders, but it was brought there against its will; it was clearly recognized and attempted to be controlled and protected by the Constitution—the supreme law of the land—and the people of the South, not believing that any other or better disposition could be made of the slaves than by holding them in bondage, only continued to do this.
In the meantime numerous efforts were made, both by Southern States and by individuals, to abolish the institution, and it is the
