ced. 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. When, after 1850, the price of slaves had risen to a
monopoly height, the leaders of the plantation system, brought to the
edge of bankruptcy by the crude and reckless farming necessary under a
slave _regime_, and baffled, at least temporarily, in their quest of new
rich land to exploit, began instinctively to feel that the only
salvation of American slavery lay in the reopening of the African
slave-trade.

It took but a spark to put this instinctive feeling into words, and
words led to deeds. The movement first took definite form in the ever
radical State of South Carolina. In 1854 a grand jury in the
Williamsburg district declared, "as our unanimous opinion, that the
Federal law abolishing the African Slave Trade is a public grievance. We
hold this trade has been and would be, if re-established, a blessing to
the American people, and a benefit to the African himself."[1] This
attracted only local attention; but when, in 1856, the governor of the
State, in his annual message, calmly argued at length for a reopening of
the trade, and boldly declared that "if we cannot supply the demand for
slave labor, then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor
we do not want,"[2] such words struck even Southern ears like "a thunder
clap in a calm day."[3] And yet it needed but a few years to show that
South Carolina had merely been the first to put into words the
inarticulate thought of a large minority, if not a majority, of the
inhabitants of the Gulf States.

81. ~Commercial Conventions of 1855-56.~ The growth of the movement is
best followed in the action of the Southern Commercial Convention, an
annual gathering which seems to have been fairly representative of a
considerable part of Southern opinion. In the convention that met at Ne