with an increased supply of the same. Together
these inventions operated naturally to enhance the value of slave labor
and slave land, and therein conduced powerfully to the slave revival in
the United States, which followed their introduction into the economic
world. The slave industrial system, no longer then a declining factor in
the life of the young nation, assumed, instead, unexpected importance in
it, and started promptly upon a course of extraordinary expansion and
prosperity.

Two other circumstances combined with the one just mentioned to produce
this unexpected and deplorable result. They were the slave compromises of
the Constitution and the early territorial expansion of the republic
southward. These compromises gathered the reviving slave system, as it
were, under the wings of the general government, and so tempered the
adverse forces with which it had to struggle for existence within the
Union to its tender condition. They embraced the right to import Negroes
into the United States, as slaves, until the year 1808, which operated to
satisfy, in part, the rising demand of the South for slave labor; also the
right to recover fugitive slaves in any part of the country, which added
immensely to the security of this species of property, and the right of
the slave-holding States, under the three-fifths rule of representation in
the lower house of Congress, to count five slaves as three freemen, which
rule, taken in conjunction with the equality of State representation in
the upper branch of that body, gave to that section an immediate and
controlling influence upon federal policy and legislation.

The territorial expansion of the republic southward coincided curiously in
point of time with the territorial needs of the slave system incident to
its industrial revival. Increased demand for the products of slave labor
in the market of the world had, by the action of natural causes, raised
the demand for that labor in the South. This increased demand was
satisfied, to a limited extent, by the Constitutional provision relative
to the importation of that labor into the United States prior to the year
1808, and to an unlimited extent by the peculiar Southern industry of
slave breeding, and the domestic slave trade, which, owing to favorable
economic conditions, became presently great and thriving enterprises for
the production of wealth. The crop of slaves grew in time to be as
valuable as the crop of cotton, and the sl