87. Increase of the Slave-Trade from 1850 to 1860.
88. Notorious Infractions of the Laws.
89. Apathy of the Federal Government.
90. Attitude of the Southern Confederacy.
91. Attitude of the United States.
80. ~The Movement against the Slave-Trade Laws.~ It was not altogether a
mistaken judgment that led the constitutional fathers to consider the
slave-trade as the backbone of slavery. An economic system based on
slave labor will find, sooner or later, that the demand for the cheapest
slave labor cannot long be withstood. Once degrade the laborer so that
he cannot assert his own rights, and there is but one limit below which
his price cannot be reduced. That limit is not his physical well-being,
for it may be, and in the Gulf States it was, cheaper to work him
rapidly to death; the limit is simply the cost of procuring him and
keeping him alive a profitable length of time. Only the moral sense of a
community can keep helpless labor from sinking to this level; and when a
community has once been debauched by slavery, its moral sense offers
little resistance to economic demand. This was the case in the West
Indies and Brazil; and although better moral stamina held the crisis
back longer in the United States, yet even here the ethical standard of
the South was not able to maintain itself against the demands of the
cotton industry.
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