avery, but its
extension to the territories, be taken as a standard, it was slight
indeed. In 1844, the Free Soil candidate, Birney, polled 62,000 votes
out of over a million and a half; the Free Soil vote of the next
campaign went beyond a quarter of a million, but the increase was due to
the strength of the leader, Martin Van Buren; four years afterward it
receded to 156,000, affording all the outward signs for the belief that
the pleas of the abolitionist found no widespread response among the
people. Yet the agitation undoubtedly ran deeper than the ballot box.
Young statesmen of the North, in whose hands the destiny of frightful
years was to lie, found their indifference to slavery broken and their
consciences stirred by the unending appeal and the tireless reiteration.
Charles Sumner afterward boasted that he read the _Liberator_ two years
before Wendell Phillips, the young Boston lawyer who cast aside his
profession to take up the dangerous cause.

=Early Southern Opposition to Slavery.=--In the South, the sentiment
against slavery was strong; it led some to believe that it would also
come to an end there in due time. Washington disliked it and directed in
his will that his own slaves should be set free after the death of his
wife. Jefferson, looking into the future, condemned the system by which
he also lived, saying: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure
when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of
the people that their liberties are the gift of God? Are they not to be
violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." Nor
did Southern men confine their sentiments to expressions of academic
opinion. They accepted in 1787 the Ordinance which excluded slavery from
the Northwest territory forever and also the Missouri Compromise, which
shut it out of a vast section of the Louisiana territory.

=The Revolution in the Slave System.=--Among the representatives of
South Carolina and Georgia, however, the anti-slavery views of
Washington and Jefferson were by no means approved; and the drift of
Southern economy was decidedly in favor of extending and perpetuating,
rather than abolishing, the system of chattel servitude. The invention
of the cotton gin and textile machinery created a market for cotton
which the planters, with all their skill and energy, could hardly
supply. Almost every available ac