th such extraordinary results attained, the natural desire of
slave-holders was to strive for development and expansion. They
had in the South more land than could be cultivated by the slaves
they then owned, or by their natural increase within any calculable
period. So great was the excess of land that, at the time Texas
was annexed, Senator Ashley of Arkansas declared that his State
alone could, with the requisite labor, produce a larger cotton-crop
than had ever been grown in the whole country. In the minds of
the extreme men of the South the remedy was to be found in re-
opening the African slave-trade. So considerate and withal so
conservative a man as Alexander H. Stephens recognized the situation.
When he retired from public service, at the close of the Thirty-
sixth Congress, in 1859, he delivered an address to his constituents,
which was in effect a full review of the Slavery question. He told
them plainly that they could not keep up the race with the North
in the occupation of new territory "unless they could get more
Africans." He did not avowedly advocate the re-opening of the
slave-trade, but the logic of his speech plainly pointed to that
end.

John Forsythe of Alabama, an aggressive leader of the most radical
pro-slavery type, carried the argument beyond the point where the
prudence of Mr. Stephens permitted him to go. In recounting the
triumphs of the South, he avowed that one stronghold remained to
be carried, "the abrogation of the prohibition of the slave-trade."
So eminent a man as William L. Yancey formally proposed in a Southern
commercial convention, in 1858, that the South should demand the
repeal of the laws "declaring the slave-trade to be piracy;" and
Governor Adams of South Carolina pronounced those laws to be "a
fraud upon the slave-holders of the South." The Governor of
Mississippi went still farther, and exhibited a confidence in the
scheme which was startling. He believed that "the North would not
refuse so just a demand if the South should unitedly ask it."
Jefferson Davis did not join in the movement, but expressed a hearty
contempt for those "who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of
the slave-trade."

Quotations of this character might be indefinitely multiplied.
The leaders of public opinion in the Cotton States were generally
tending in the same direction, and, in the language of Jefferson
Davis, were basing their conclusion on "the interest of the South,
and not on