re was brought under cotton culture as
the small farmers were driven steadily from the seaboard into the
uplands or to the Northwest.

The demand for slaves to till the swiftly expanding fields was enormous.
The number of bondmen rose from 700,000 in Washington's day to more than
three millions in 1850. At the same time slavery itself was transformed.
Instead of the homestead where the same family of masters kept the same
families of slaves from generation to generation, came the plantation
system of the Far South and Southwest where masters were ever moving and
ever extending their holdings of lands and slaves. This in turn reacted
on the older South where the raising of slaves for the market became a
regular and highly profitable business.

[Illustration: _From an old print_

JOHN C. CALHOUN]

=Slavery Defended as a Positive Good.=--As the abolition agitation
increased and the planting system expanded, apologies for slavery became
fainter and fainter in the South. Then apologies were superseded by
claims that slavery was a beneficial scheme of labor control. Calhoun,
in a famous speech in the Senate in 1837, sounded the new note by
declaring slavery "instead of an evil, a good--a positive good." His
reasoning was as follows: in every civilized society one portion of the
community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the
arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his
master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than
the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts
between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this
respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left
undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in
wealth and numbers."

=Slave Owners Dominate Politics.=--The new doctrine of Calhoun was
eagerly seized by the planters as they came more and more to overshadow
the small farmers of the South and as they beheld the menace of
abolition growing upon the horizon. It formed, as they viewed matters, a
moral defense for their labor system--sound, logical, invincible. It
warranted them in drawing together for the protection of an institution
so necessary, so inevitable, so beneficent.

Though in 1850 the slave owners were only about three hundred and fifty
thousand in a national population of nearly twenty million whites, they
had an influence all out of proportion to the