the interest of the African." Newspapers and literary
reviews in the Gulf States were seconding and enforcing the position
of their public men, and were gradually but surely leading the mind
of the South to a formal demand for the privilege of importing
Africans. A speaker in the Democratic National Convention at
Charleston, personally engaged in the domestic slave-trade, frankly
declared that the traffic in native Africans would be far more
humane. The thirty thousand slaves annually taken from the border
States to the cotton-belt represented so great an aggregation of
misery, that the men engaged in conducting it were, even by the
better class of slave-holders, regarded with abhorrence, and spoken
of as infamous.

It is worthy of observation that the re-opening of the African
slave-trade was not proposed in the South until after the Dred
Scott decision. This affords a measure of the importance which
pro-slavery statesmen attached to the position of the Supreme Court.
In the light of these facts, the repeated protests of Senator
Douglas "against such schemes as the re-opening of the African
slave-trade" were full of significance; nor could any development
of Southern opinion have vindicated more completely the truth
proclaimed by Mr. Lincoln, that the country was destined to become
wholly anti-slavery or wholly pro-slavery. The financial interest
at stake in the fate of the institution was so vast, that Southern
men felt impelled to seek every possible safeguard against the
innumerable dangers which surrounded it. The revival of the African
slave-trade was the last suggestion for its protection, and was
the immediate precursor of its destruction.

In reckoning the wealth-producing power of the Southern States,
the field of slave labor has been confined to the cotton-belt. In
the more northern of the slave-holding States, free labor was more
profitable, and hence the interest in Slavery was not so vital or
so enduring as in the extreme South. There can be little doubt
that the slave States of the border would have abolished the
institution at an early period except for the fact that their slaves
became a steady and valuable source of labor-supply for the increased
demand which came from the constantly expanding area of cotton.
But his did not create so palpable or so pressing an interest as
was felt in the Gulf States, and the resentment caused by the
election of Lincoln was proportionately less. The bord