arrangement cruisers were to proceed
direct to Africa with such cargoes, instead of first landing them in
this country.[86]

90. ~Attitude of the Southern Confederacy.~ The attempt, initiated by
the constitutional fathers, to separate the problem of slavery from that
of the slave-trade had, after a trial of half a century, signally
failed, and for well-defined economic reasons. The nation had at last
come to the parting of the ways, one of which led to a free-labor
system, the other to a slave system fed by the slave-trade. Both
sections of the country naturally hesitated at the cross-roads: the
North clung to the delusion that a territorially limited system of
slavery, without a slave-trade, was still possible in the South; the
South hesitated to fight for her logical object--slavery and free trade
in Negroes--and, in her moral and economic dilemma, sought to make
autonomy and the Constitution her object. The real line of contention
was, however, fixed by years of development, and was unalterable by the
present whims or wishes of the contestants, no matter how important or
interesting these might be: the triumph of the North meant free labor;
the triumph of the South meant slavery and the slave-trade.

It is doubtful if many of the Southern leaders ever deceived themselves
by thinking that Southern slavery, as it then was, could long be
maintained without a general or a partial reopening of the slave-trade.
Many had openly declared this a few years before, and there was no
reason for a change of opinion. Nevertheless, at the outbreak of actual
war and secession, there were powerful and decisive reasons for
relegating the question temporarily to the rear. In the first place,
only by this means could the adherence of important Border States be
secured, without the aid of which secession was folly. Secondly, while
it did no harm to laud the independence of the South and the kingship of
cotton in "stump" speeches and conventions, yet, when it came to actual
hostilities, the South sorely needed the aid of Europe; and this a
nation fighting for slavery and the slave-trade stood poor chance of
getting. Consequently, after attacking the slave-trade laws for a
decade, and their execution for a quarter-century, we find the Southern
leaders inserting, in both the provisional and the permanent
Constitutions of the Confederate States, the following article:--

The importation of negroes of the African race, from any foreign