W.E.B. Du Bois: “It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad.”

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.