very height of the slave power, formed the moral bulwark of its established order. The system did not, of course, spring full blown from the mind of any single thinker. It was the work of many minds, separate departments being added from year to year under the stress of attack from without and the pressure of fusion within. At length it was finished—an exhaustive compendium of historical, legal, constitutional, economic, religious, ethical, and philosophical arguments in support of slavery, a vast and intricate body of logic suffused with the glow of righteous sincerity and adorned with gems of classical eloquence—a ready and inspiring guide capable of sustaining those troubled by doubts and fortifying combatants on the firing line of politics. Representatives in Congress, newspaper editors in their sanctums, clergymen in their pulpits, professors in their institutions of learning, and political leaders ranging from national figures down to village politicians now had at their tongue's tips a reply to every attack, a foil for every thrust. By the irony of fate the great argument reached its perfection at the very moment when the economic class for which it provided moral assurance had passed the peak of its power and, unknown to its defenders, was tottering on the brink of doom.
Winwood Reade in The Martyrdom of Man characterizes the South's attitude of defence in these words:
The Southerners were invariably provincial in their feelings; they did not consider themselves as belonging to a nation, but a league; they inherited the sentiments of aversion and distrust with which their fathers had entered the Union; threats and provisoes were always on their lips. . . . The history of the South within the Union is that of a people struggling for existence by means of political devices against the spirit of the nation and the spirit of the age.
