ing to guide it except its own discretion, was now represented to Christendom as a contest between slavery and anti-slavery. Every strict constructionist was contemptuously thrust into the "pro-slavery" party, including even Thomas Jefferson, whose election to the Presidency in 1801 began to be spoken of as the "advent of the slave power. "'1 And such was the success crowning their labors that by 1860 they had made themselves respectable in some States in the North, and in Massachusetts, as events proved, they constituted a majority of the people; and the uninformed were, in the New England States at least, yielding to the preaching of the fierce fanatics, and accepting their assertions that the struggle for sectional control of the Federal Government was nothing less than an "irrepressible conflict" between liberty and slavery-between the "great moral ideas" 'Everybody who reads knows that Mr. Jefferson was opposed to slavery. But this "slave power" fiction can be found in any modern sketch of the life of John Adams as his excuse for refusing to extend to Mr. Jefferson the courtesy supposed to be due from a retiring President to his successor. Alden's Cyclopædia (Art. John Adams) says "The slave power was also beginning to be a factor in domestic politics, under the leadership of Jefferson, and so, on the election of his rival to the Presidential chair, Adams vacated the office without even waiting to see his successor take his seat." And yet this same Cyclopædia (Art. Massachusetts) says that the nineteen electoral votes of Massachusetts in 1804 were cast for Mr. Jefferson. This "slave power" falsehood figures also in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, with American Revisions and Additions, Volume I, page 142. Accounting for the defeat of Mr. Adams, it says: "Owing to this division of his own friends, rather than to a want of public confidence, at the conclusion of the four years, etc., Mr. Adams was not reelected. Perhaps this was in some measure owing to the preponderance of the slave States, in which Mr. Jefferson, his rival, and a proprietor of slaves, had a fellow-feeling among the chief of the people." 1 of the North and one of the "twin relics of barbarism" in the South. In the newspapers, in the magazines, in the stump speeches, and in the sermons and lectures, every phase of slavery was discolored; the Southern slave-owner was represented to the ignorant as a monster; and the humanity which the most sordid self-interest would dictate was denied to him.2 But perhaps the most effective appeal to the laboring class was the picture of the slave-holder as an idle aristocrat who reveled in wealth at the expense of his "unpaid" labor; and whose idleness gave him opportunities of devising schemes to enable the "slave power" to inflict untold imaginary evils on the North. The charge against the Southern man which more effectually than any other wrought on the sensibilities of the humane, was that his laborers received no "wages"; that they worked from Monday morning till These "great moral ideas" were gradually embodied in the pub lic mind into a “higher law" than the Constitution, that instrument and its supporters falling into discredit. That most powerful of all the arguments of the abolitionists (Uncle Tom's Cabin), whose dramatic interest caused it to be translated into more languages than any other work written in the English language, sneered at the Constitution in this wise: "So spoke this poor, heathenish Kentuckian, who had not been instructed in his constitutional relations, and consequently was betrayed into acting in a sort of Christianized manner, which, if he had been better situated and more enlightened, he would not have been left to do.”—(P. 64). 2 It was the insolent abuse of Senator Butler (in his absence) by Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, delivered from the high perch of his lofty ignorance of the history of his own State, which caused Representative Brooks, of South Carolina (a relative of Butler), to make what Northern writers call a "murderous assault" on Mr. Sumner. Mr. Sumner pretended to be laid up for three years, traveled over Europe exhibiting his sores, posing as a martyr, and denouncing the "barbarism of slavery." Saturday night with scant food and no wages. And this falsehood became imbedded among the foundations on which so-called "American History" has been built up. The truth, however, is that the slave was cared for from infancy to old age, sick or well, and enjoyed more of the necessaries and comforts of life than, with exceedingly rare exceptions, he has enjoyed since 1865; and taking into account the care of his mother, of him as an infant, as a child, and as an old and helpless man (including losses by death), it is quite likely that the "wages" paid by his owner were equal to the wages received by laborers of like skill in the Northern States, while his hours of labor were shorter. On both of these points the testimony of the New York World is worth recording. Referring to the strike of the garment-makers in New York in the first half of the year 1897, it said: "The negro slave was at least well fed, well housed, well clothed, and not overworked. There was nowhere in negro slavery such cruelty, such want or squalid and hopeless poverty as that which an inexorable 'economic law' imposes upon the journeymen tailors who are just now striking for the right to keep soul and body together. These people work more hours in the day than any man or animal can endure."1 As to houses, the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, quoted in Public Opinion, December 27, 1894, stated that 1,333,000 people in New York City lived in 39,138 tenement houses, a fraction over 34 persons to the housea "tenement house being defined by law," says Alden's Cyclopædia, "as a house occupied by three or more families living independently * * K or by more than two families on a floor," etc. "The Health Department," says this Cyclopædia, "found five families in a 'From Wilmington (N. C.) Messenger of June 6, 1897. room 12 by 12 feet square; another family paying $8.50 per month for a room 7 by 7 feet on a top floor." And, yet, "in 1880," says the same authority, "the average number of persons to a dwelling was about half that in Brooklyn, Boston and London." On the general subject of the comparative conditions of the "unpaid" laborer of the ante-bellum South and the wage-earner of the North, let us hear what was said by the Journal of the Knights of Labor, copied in Public Opinion, February 28, 1895: 66 "The Republic is a delusion, freedom is a dream, and the song of liberty is a funeral dirge. * * * The Autocrats last hope of the poor is being squeezed out. rule, rob, and revel. Labor is hampered, hungry, and haggard. All the bullets, bayonets, and bludgeons of the country are centralized around stolen dollars. Sixty million voices demand justice for overworked and underpaid labor," etc. * * * Such a wail never went up from the "chattels" of the South; and yet the people who by misgovernment have filled the land with tramps (a class of unfortunates never heard of till twelve years after the Government fell exclusively into the hands of "the North"),' and erected a virtual plutocratic tyranny over these once free and co-equal sovereign States, are demanding the admiration of all lovers of freedom because they made a freeman of the negro in a land where he is denied respectable employment except from the Southern white man, and in which the "humanitarians" refuse to give him control of even a fourth-class post-office anywhere else than in the South! 1 See Note V. * * NOTE U. In Virginia the anti-slavery sentiment, which was perhaps more demonstrative than in North Carolina, was silenced by the same causes. Nat Turner's insurrection produced a profound impression, and possible dangers it foreshadowed excited the emancipationists to renewed efforts. "Men began to think and reason about the evils and insecurity of slavery; the subject of emancipation was discussed both publicly and privately, and was prominently introduced into the popular branch of the Legislature at the ensuing session of 1831-'32. * * * The debate which sprang up, upon the abstract proposition declaring it expedient to abolish slavery, was characterized by all the powers of argument and all the graces of eloquence. * After an animated contest, the question was settled by a kind of compromise, in which the evils of slavery were distinctly recognized, but that views of expediency required that further ac. tion on the subject should be postponed. That a question so vitally important would have been renewed with more success at an earlier subsequent period, seems more than probable, if the current opinions of the day can be relied on; but there were obvious causes in operation which paralyzed the friends of abolition, and have had the effect of silencing all agitation on the subject. The abolitionists in the Northern and Eastern States, gradually increasing their strength as a party, became louder in their denunciations of slavery, and more and more reckless in the means adopted for assailing the Constitutional rights of the South. The open and avowed security given to fugitive slaves, not only by the efforts of private societies, but by public official acts in some of the free States, together with the constant circulation of incendiary tracts, calculated to endanger the safety of slave-holding communities, have awakened a spirit of proud and determined resistance; and now it is almost impossible to tell when the passions shall have sufficiently cooled for a calm consideration of the subject." NOTE V. In pursuance of the policy to "multiply, develop, and strengthen the North," the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, was passed, offering extraordinary inducements to foreigners to flock to the shores of the Northern States; and, as if this were not enough, an act was passed on July 4, 1864, providing that foreigners might enter into contracts for the payment of their passage money out of their earnings, etc., after arrival, thus establishing the "contract labor" system, which in after years "came home to roost." 'Historical Collections of Virginia by Henry Howe, published in |