The investment of the South in slaves represented a capital of two thousand millions of dollars, reckoned only upon the salable value of the chattel.

Estimated by its capacity to produce wealth, the institution of Slavery represented to the white population of the South a sum vastly in excess of two thousand millions.

Without slave-labor, the cotton, rice, and sugar lands were, in the view of Southern men, absolutely valueless.

With the labor of the slave, they could produce three hundred millions a year in excess of the food required for the population.

In the history of the world there has perhaps never been so vast an amount of productive capital firmly consolidated under one power, subject to the ultimate control and direction of so small a number of men.

The thirty thousand slaves annually taken from the border States to the cotton-belt represented so great an aggregation of misery, that the men engaged in conducting it were, even by the better class of slave-holders, regarded with…

It is worthy of observation that the re-opening of the African slave-trade was not proposed in the South until after the Dred Scott decision.

This affords a measure of the importance which pro-slavery statesmen attached to the position of the Supreme Court.

The financial interest at stake in the fate of the institution was so vast, that Southern men felt impelled to seek every possible safeguard against the innumerable dangers which surrounded it.

In the more northern of the slave-holding States, free labor was more profitable, and hence the interest in Slavery was not so vital or so enduring as in the extreme South.

In the passions aroused by the agitation over slavery, Southern men failed to see (what in cooler moments they could readily perceive) that the existence of the Union and the guaranties of the Constitution were the shield and safeguard of…

The long contest they had been waging with the anti-slavery men of the free States had blinded Southern zealots to the essential strength of their position so long as their States continued to be members of the Federal Union.

But for the constant presence of national power, and its constant exercise under the provisions of the Constitution, the South would have had no protection against the anti-slavery assaults of the civilized world.

They disregarded the enlightened philanthropy and the awakened conscience which had abolished slavery in every other Republic of America, which had thrown the protection of law over the helpless millions of India, which had moved even the…

They would not realize that the contest they were rashly inviting was not alone with the anti-slavery men of the free States, not alone with the spirit of loyalty to the Republic, but that it carried with it a challenge to the progress of…

The division upon the tariff was never so accurately defined by geographical lines as was the division upon slavery; but the aggressive elements on each side of both questions finally coalesced in the same States, North and South.

Anti-slavery zeal and a tariff for protection went hand in hand in New England, while pro-slavery principles became nearly identical with free-trade in the Cotton States.

Zeal against slavery was necessarily accompanied by an appreciation of the dignity of free labor; and free labor was more generously remunerated under the stimulus of protective laws.

The same considerations produced a directly opposite conclusion in the South, where those interest in slave labor could not afford to build up a class of free laborers with high wages and independent opinions.

The one involved the highest moral considerations, the other was governed solely by expediency.

Whether one man could hold property in another was a question which took deep hold of the consciences of men, and was either right or wrong in itself.

But whether the rate of duty upon a foreign import should be increased or lowered was a question to be settled solely by business and financial considerations.

Taxes, whether direct or indirect, always interest the mass of mankind, and the differences of the systems by which they shall be levied and collected will always present an absorbing political issue.

Public attention may be temporarily engrossed by some exigent subject of controversy, but the tariff alone steadily and persistently recurs for agitation, and for what is termed settlement.

Thus far in our history, settlement has only been the basis of new agitation, and each successive agitation leads again to new settlement.